


my heart's the same

by bazzystar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Body Horror, F/F, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Protagonist, Female Steve Rogers, Female-Centric, General Post-Winter Soldier Warnings Apply, Let Me Stress Body Horror, PTSD, Please Let Me Know If There Is Anything Else I Should Tag, Real/Not Real, Slow Burn, There Will Be Sex I Guess, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2018-06-01 06:53:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 38,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6505681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazzystar/pseuds/bazzystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Super Soldier is a woman. The Winter Soldier is a woman. Everything else is more or less the same.</p><p>(It's a lesbian AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. drawing the line

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the MCU timeline & characters. Will update periodically for as long as it takes, I suppose.
> 
> Shouts always to [mutationalfalsetto](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mutationalfalsetto), who has allowed me to screech at her about this (and Bucky) for what feels like our entire friendship.
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the lyrics of a song that I have loved for years, and the first time I saw CA:TWS I thought about it in the context of Steve/Bucky and I haven't ever really stopped. Those lyrics are posted here below.
> 
> I am new to the whole fic game and I am realizing how communicative most authors are, and that I haven't really been that way so far with this fic, and I'd like to change that. So if you have questions or comments or feedback or you just wanna chat, please drop me a line. I also realized that chapter summaries are not really as optional as I thought they were, so I have gone through and added those to the existing chapters and I will continue to do that going forward. Thank you for bearing with me, sorry this note is now a thousand years long, if you're just getting here and you're starting from the beginning, uh, I've always been great at this and you don't even need to worry about it, don't even give it a second thought. Those of you who have been reading and commenting so far: thank you, you are giving me hope and strength, thank you again.
> 
> MY HEART'S THE SAME
> 
> your heart's breaking in me  
> like I ain't been broke before  
> and it feels good-  
> it feels good  
> it feels good, we should do this more
> 
> I can't see your ears no more  
> I fell in love with you when your hair was still short  
> but now you've gone and matured  
> I think someday you'll cut it  
> someday you'll cut it  
> like we cut it short
> 
> I can still see your face  
> although the years may have forced some change  
> and I know I'm no longer the same  
> and I hope I don't show it  
> I hope I don't show it  
> but my heart's the same
> 
> one by one they come and pass  
> in pairs of two we know we can't last  
> and I hope I don't show it  
> I hope I don't show it  
> but my heart's the same
> 
> promise, promise sweetheart  
> fingers 'round in time  
> fingers 'round each other  
> and all of this in time  
> but the cold ain't so cold  
> when you hold  
> yourself to me

Stevie meets Buffy when she is eleven. 

Buffy is twelve and strong, the eldest of four and the only girl, although Stevie doesn't know any of this at the time. She only knows that one moment she is flat on her back, one arm shielding her face as Jimmy Akerley gets ready to hit her again, the other boxing fruitlessly at his right ear, and the next thing she feels is not another blow but a weight lifting. She opens her eyes and there is a girl, and the girl has Jimmy by the back of his collar. She is silhouetted against the sun; from where Stevie is lying she is only a shadow. She hauls Jimmy up and shoves him out, away from herself and Stevie, and drops into a fighting stance, hands loose and ready in front of her face. Jimmy lunges for her at once and she ducks under his arm, slugs him hard in the solar plexus. The air whooshes out of him and his face goes a sick clammy gray. He drops to his knees, gasping and wheezing, and suddenly Stevie's view of him is obscured by an outstretched hand.

"You okay?" asks the shadow, and her hand is cool in Stevie's as she pulls her off the ground. The shadow has grayblue eyes under dark, softly curling hair and what Stevie's mother calls a dolphin mouth, full lips that sweep down to a slight upward curl at the edges even at rest, making it look like she's just on the edge of a smile. 

"Yeah." Stevie sweeps the grit off her shorts, feels her cheeks burning. "You didn't have to do that."

The girl shrugs. "I don't like bullies."

Stevie drops her gaze. They both look at Jimmy for awhile, watching as he struggles to his feet and lists away across the playground.

"I can take care of myself," Stevie says into the silence, not turning her head.

"I don't doubt it," comes the answer. "The thing is, you don't always have to."

Stevie looks at the girl, sees the corner of her mouth stretch upward. "I'm Stevie," she says.

"Buffy."

They shake hands.

\--

"So where'd you learn to punch like that, anyway?"

They are walking down the sidewalk, ice cream melting onto their wrists. Buffy smiles. "I have three brothers. They're younger than me, but they're already bigger."

Stevie whistles. "Jeez. Do you have to fight for dinner?"

Buffy barks a laugh into the street like it's been startled out of her, a big bright _HAH_ that bounces off the buildings and echoes back to them. She pushes Stevie's shoulder, gently.  
"Yeah, but unlike you, Rogers, I win."

"Going for the throat already," Stevie sighs, jostling her back. "Wait 'til I have a growth spurt. I'll be able to put you in my pocket."

"Oh, good, _tall_ and skinny. _That'll_ be an improvement."

"I'll put on muscle!"

"Not if you fight like that, you won't."

"You caught me on a bad day. I'm usually better than that."

Buffy stops walking then, her face serious, and looks at Stevie.

"You're not, though, are you?" Stevie bites a circle out of her ice cream, and Buffy folds her arms. "This happen a lot?"

Stevie shakes her head. "Not - no. Sometimes. Not that often."

"You ever think about not fighting?" Buffy crumples her paper wrapper and lobs it into a trash can. "No shame in knowing when to run. Trust me."

Stevie shakes her head again, harder this time. "I don't run."

\--

They have some iteration of this conversation almost monthly for the next year, Buffy enumerating the various reasons not to fight ("You stay alive, right, which is number one, number two, I don't have time to always rescue your ass-" "-You volunteered for that, no one asked you to do it-" "Number three, you're going to start losing permanent teeth and that's really going to put a damper on your social life-") as she scrapes Stevie off of the pavement all over Brooklyn. Finally, on a sweltering Wednesday in the middle of summer, she hauls Stevie out of bed.  
"C'mon, Rogers," she says as she drags her out the door. "Where are we going?" rasps Stevie, rubbing her eyes.  
"You'll see."

Buffy covers her eyes for the last block before their destination, which results in stepped-on toes all around, but finally they crabwalk their way awkwardly through a door with a bell over it.

Stevie smells sweat and rubber and before Buffy uncovers her eyes she knows where they are. Barnes & Sons Boxing Club.

She starts to protest, "Buff, I don't have the money," and Buffy moves her hands from Stevie's eyes to cover her mouth. "This is on the house," she says, "because the house is tired of watching you get run through the wringer." She puts her hands on her hips and waits.

Stevie sighs heavily. "You know it's not your job to protect me, Buffy."

"I know," she answers triumphantly. "That's why I'm gonna teach you to do it yourself."

They spend the summer fighting.

By August, Stevie can land a right hook with a fair amount of force, and she's sparring with the smaller boys who train at the gym. Buffy is far beyond her, stronger every day, fighting gangly teenage boys to a win or draw every round. They compare biceps on the walk home, Buffy nodding approvingly as she squeezes Stevie's skinny arm. "Still skinny, but a little bit of muscle under there now," she says, then flexes her own arm. "I'm gonna get Walters down soon, it's only a matter of time." She slings her arm around Stevie's shoulders and they walk on. "I wish we didn't have to go back to school."

"We've still got a few weeks."

"I know," Buffy sighs. "I just get so bored."

Stevie rolls her eyes. "I'm not sure how much sympathy I can have for someone who's bored because they already know everything."

"Well-!" Buffy's tone is pleading. "I'm still suffering! Look at me, Stevie." She clutches at her chest. "I'm dying here. They won't let me skip ahead _anywhere_. I might as well not _go_ to school. My brain has about as much muscle as you do."

Stevie makes an outraged sound.

"I'm kidding," says Buffy, and hooks her closer. "I gotta find something new to learn, though."

\--

"She has a lot of aggression," Buffy's father says thoughtfully to Stevie one day in October as they watch her box a high-schooler into a corner, quick rabbit punches that bring him to his knees, barely breaking a sweat. She throws Stevie a grin.

"I don't know," Stevie muses, not thinking about who she's talking to. When she watches Buffy fight she sees someone solving a puzzle, playing a physical game of chess. She sees a quick bright intelligence that is almost almost predatory in its intensity. "She's really thoughtful about it."  
She realizes that Mr. Barnes is looking at her curiously. "Not to contradict you, sir, I just mean-" she says quickly. "She's very controlled. You can tell she's thinking when she fights."

Buffy's dad nods slowly, as if he's thinking about how to phrase what he says next.

"Aggression can be very controlled, Stevie," he says. "You can put a lot of very careful thought into violence. That's why we train, so that we learn how to focus that energy, use it safely. It's not about hurting someone else. It's about defending yourself. Remember that."  
He claps her on the shoulder. "You're getting better, you know. Saw you tag Bobby the other day. It was a good hit."

She smiles and ducks her head. "I wish my lungs were better." She doesn't say _I wish my whole body was better._

"Well, there's nothing you can do about what God gave ya, kid. You just have to learn to work with it."

\--

It is December. Stevie is at the library, browsing for ideas for her mother's Christmas gift. She wanders down the aisles of the fiction section, her fingers trailing along the dusty shelves, and something catches her eye. It is a book with no library sticker, its spine bare and blue, stamped with heavy gold lettering: _The American Black Chamber_. She pulls it off the shelf and flips it open to a page of gibberish. "What the-" She squints at it, turns it over to read the ad copy. Cryptography, it says. The secret inner workings of the American government's code-breaking department during the Great War.

The _World_ War.

Stevie closes her eyes for a breath, fighting a wave of emotion. She looks at the book again, thinks _Dad_ , shoves it under her arm. She grabs a few more books off the shelf, barely glancing at the titles, and makes her way back to the front of the library.

"It's not one of ours," says the woman at the desk after a cursory inspection. "Just take it. Put it in the donation box when you're done." Stevie nods, clutching the books to her chest, and darts out the door before the woman can change her mind.

She thinks about her father as she walks home. 

Joseph Grant Rogers, killed in action, never made it home to his wife and unborn child. He played the piano. He couldn't cook but he tried anyway. He drew little pictures of himself and Sarah - at Coney Island, getting married, on a boat with big sails - and left them around the apartment for her to find. He wanted a boy - she knows that from the letters he wrote to her mother. _Give little Steve my love_ , he’d scrawled in firm, blocky cursive. _Tell him I'll be home soon_. He signed the letters _Yours always_. She knows these things, but only these, and she can't assemble them into a whole. Her mother has his Purple Heart in a box on her tiny bedside table. 

"He would have been so proud of you," she said once as she bandaged Stevie's knee. "You're scrappy, just like he was. Always so sure of what was right and wrong... so willing to fight for it." Her smile was sad and hollow and Stevie heard her crying in the bathroom when she went to put the iodine away.

Every mention of him is a surprise, a gift dropped into her lap at the strangest times. Sarah will be mixing dough, looking out the window, eyes soft, and almost to herself she will say _he always loved when the weather was like this_. In the aisle of the grocery store, tinny radio playing from the counter, _he always loved this song. He always lost his gloves. He always._

Stevie doesn't ask about him. She did, once, insistently, and that was when she found out how he'd died. Her mother went out on the fire escape and held the Purple Heart tight in both her hands and didn't come back inside until it was dark out.

Stevie doesn't ask about him. She scoops up the crumbs she is given, quick and birdlike, and waits for more. She devours everything she can find about the war, and in her mind he is always there. She imagines him in foxholes. She paints him in broad strokes, every soldier in every movie. Crawling under barbed wire. Asleep on the ground with a picture of Sarah inside his uniform. Taking a bullet meant for another man. She waits for the picture of him to come into focus. 

Her mother sees the book when she comes home, sitting on her shelf with the rest of them, and sighs. She tells her never to fall in love with a soldier and Stevie nods, but she thinks _how could anyone keep themselves from it?_

To fight, to be willing to die to defend what is right - surely this is the only thing that matters. Surely, she thinks, it is worth the pain to love someone who understands that. She wishes he had lived, had come home to her mother, but she doesn’t blame him. How could she, when everything in her knows that she would make the same choice? _He did it for you. For everyone._

She stares at the book as she falls asleep, the gold lettering glinting faintly in the dark. She knows her father wasn't a codebreaker - one of the few things she knows is that he was in the 107th Infantry, and that he was killed by mustard gas - but it still feels important, this book, another link in a chain that connects her to him. She feels like she is supposed to have it, somehow, and she doesn't realize why until she sees Buffy waiting outside her apartment the next morning, breath crackling in the frozen air.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> High school into college into the rug pulled out from underneath them both.

Buffy takes to cryptography like a fish to water. She reads the book in a single night, then again, and again. She carries it with her like a Bible. She drags Stevie all over Brooklyn, to every tiny bookstore she can find, in search of more. She writes letter after letter. She stops complaining about school.

Stevie watches her, late at night after boxing, after homework, as she chews her pencils and scribbles. High school passes in a blur of coded notes tucked into her jacket pockets, her lunch bags. Buffy always uses the same cipher for her, and after awhile it’s a language she knows.

_My name is Buffy. Your name is Stevie. Spin around in a circle when you see me before lunch if you can read this._  
She gets stronger.  
_You know it’s getting too warm for a leather jacket, right?_  
She can run ten miles.  
_Let's go uptown after school. I think I found another place._  
She can box someone her own size into the corner.  
_If you were better at math you could respond in code!_  
They apply to an art school uptown.  
_Think I’m gonna learn Russian. They say different alphabets are really useful._

Two weeks into their first year, Stevie gets a telegram. 

She reads it and sinks numbly to the floor, and she’s still staring at it when Buffy comes back to their shared room, toweling her hair.  
“Rogers. You okay? You look sicker than usual.”  
She grins, but when Stevie doesn’t say anything she crouches down in front of her.  
“Stevie,” she says, brushing her hair back from her face. “Stevie, what is it?”  
Stevie hands her the telegram.  
“Oh,” says Buffy, and she pulls Stevie into her lap, and Stevie presses her face into Buffy’s shoulder and cries.

Buffy helps her make the arrangements, borrows money from her dad to get everything squared away. Stevie doesn’t even protest. She doesn’t do much of anything during the week leading up to the funeral. Buffy washes her hair, dresses her like a doll, pulling her arms through the sleeves of the black dress as gently as she can. They stand in the grass watching the priest, watching the coffin. She scoops up a handful of earth when it is time - when Buffy nudges her to do so - and lets it sift through her fingers into the grave.

In the taxi, on the way back to campus, she turns to Buffy.  
“I’m sorry,” she says.  
  
Buffy looks confused, almost suspicious. “For what?”  
“For-” She gestures helplessly at herself. “All of this. For not being strong.”  
Buffy’s expression darkens, and she grabs Stevie's hand roughly. “The hell with that. You’re the strongest person I know. You don’t have anything to apologize for-”  
“I should have been able to get through this, Buff. You did so much - I have to manage on my own-”  
“No, Stevie.” Her smile is wry and sad. “No, you don’t. That’s what I’ve been telling you for years. You don’t have to do things alone. I’m with you, you know? You’re not getting rid of me.”  
Stevie closes her eyes, but the tears come nonetheless.  
Buffy puts her head on Stevie’s shoulder and sighs.  
“I’m with you, Rogers. I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”  
They stay like that all the way home.

Somehow, they make it through the year. 

Stevie takes a summer course, spends five straight weeks with ink-stained fingers. She corners one of the boys above her weight class. She spars with Buffy, lasts all of forty seconds in the ring. She starts wearing pants. Buffy reads to her in Russian while she does sit-ups on the bare wood floor of their room. Her spine bruises. 

She doesn’t get taller, and she stays skinny. She still feels her lungs crackle in the morning as she stretches against a lamppost. She sketches Buffy’s profile as she writes pages and pages, numbers and letters and symbols she doesn’t recognize. She goes on a date with a boy named Alan and he steps on her toes. Buffy goes on many dates, with many boys, and comes back to the room flushed and smiling lazily. She talks about them as if they are a distraction, which they are, and goes back to her crowded notebooks. 

She keeps fighting. She fights until they knock her down and then she gets up again. She pushes herself up off the ground and stands, blood running into her eyes, and she waits. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for. She keeps fighting. 

And then, one day, it happens.

Buffy bursts into the tiny room, the door slamming open so hard it dents the wall. 

“Stevie,” she says, and her eyes are shining, and she is clutching a letter. She thrusts it into Stevie’s hands, her own fingers trembling. Stevie turns it over, smooths the paper. The letterhead is an eagle, and there is a single word stamped across it.

“Shield?” says Stevie.

“S.H.I.E.L.D.” Buffy gives it more weight somehow, the word sparking off her teeth. She’s pacing in circles, breathing quickly, running her hands through her hair. “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. I - I thought they were a myth, I thought - I wrote so many -” She sighs shakily, rubs a hand over her mouth. “Stevie. They want me with them. They want me to be a code-breaker.”

She meets Stevie’s eyes.

“Stevie, we’re going to war.”

Stevie is dimly aware that Buffy is still speaking, looking at her, waiting for some kind of response, but there is a strange echoey ringing in her ears that drowns out Buffy’s voice. She stands up from the bed where she’s been sitting, the sound getting louder and sharper, making her wince, and moves toward the door. Buffy puts a hand on her arm but she barely feels it, shakes it away, and then she is out the door, she is on the street, she is running and running and running. She runs until her lungs are whistling louder than the sound in her head, until a sharp searing pain drives what little breath she has left from her body. She gasps and pants and folds down onto the ground, head pressed into her drawn-up knees, and it is only then that she realizes she is crying.

When she gets back to the room it is dark. As soon as she opens the door she feels it, the emptiness, the wrongness of the space. She turns on the light and Buffy’s bed is empty and bare. There is a square of paper sitting on Stevie’s pillow.

_Stevie-_  
_They said I had to leave today if I was going to go with them. They want all of us to have basic military training, even in intelligence work, before they send us overseas. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to say goodbye. I’m sorry to leave so suddenly._  
_Stark said we’ll be back in a few months for a day or so before we ship out._  
_You’re my best friend, Rogers. No matter what happens, I’m with you. 'Til the end of the line._  
_Please don’t be mad. I’ll write if I can. I’ll be back before you know it._  
_-B_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buffy likes to make an entrance.

“Come off it, kid,” she hears from somewhere above her. She pushes herself up, stands, staggers. Stands. She looks at him.

“Don’t make me hit you again,” he says, and there is almost a plaintive note in his voice, but something dark flickers in his eyes.

She shakes her head, a rope of bloody saliva swinging from her chin. “I can do this all day.”

His jaw tightens and there is a blur of movement before the explosion in her left ear. Her vision grays and she drops to one knee. “Stay down,” he sneers, and he turns to walk away.

She has been rejected by recruiters in every county. She has lied about her age, her address, her name, her medical history, and she has never even gotten as far as the physical. They take one look at her, these massive barrel-chested men, these glasses-wearing army doctors, and their eyes show them a frail young man, five foot four, all skinny wrists and sunken chest. She pleads with them every time, begs them to give her a chance, but they stamp her 4F and show her the door. She is starting to lose hope.

She gets up.

He wheels around, arm arcing out into a big wide swing, and she ducks and snatches the lid of the garbage can next to her. She pulls it in front of her face just in time for his fist to clang into it with a satisfying crunch. He gives a wordless roar, a guttural sound of rage, and seizes the shield with his other hand. He wrenches it away and flings it down the alley behind him, then lunges at her. Then she is on the ground again, the toe of his shoe thudding into her ribs rhythmically as he grunts, “I - told you - to stay - _down_ -” and then there is a short sharp gasp and the kicking stops.

Silence. Stillness. Breathing that isn’t her own.

She looks up and she almost laughs.

Does laugh, a little, one huffing breath that leaves blood bubbling from her mouth.

Buffy Barnes is standing there, looking like a damn superhero. Dark green uniform, hat cocked atop jet-black hair, thunderous expression. Long arm extended ramrod straight, a perfect line from shoulder to wrist, and in her hand, a gun.

“I think it’s time you run along, friend,” she suggests, and the man who has been kicking Stevie raises his hands. “He started it!”

Buffy raises an eyebrow and cocks the gun.

He runs along.

“That’s new,” says Stevie as she gets to her feet, pushing herself off the brick wall for leverage. She wipes the blood off her chin. “More finesse than the usual punching approach.”

Buffy’s expression does not change as she lowers the gun and looks at Stevie.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Hello to you, too,” she says, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice. “I thought you were going to write.”

Buffy’s mouth twists for a split second and then she snaps, “Don’t change the subject. What the hell is this?”

Stevie runs her hands through her hair. She’s used to it now, the feeling of lightness, the air on the back of her neck. She has forgotten how to be startled by it. “Oh,” she says. “I, ah. I’m trying to join the army.”

Buffy rears back like Stevie’s struck her. Like this is so impossible to believe that she has to physically get away from it. That hurts Stevie as much as the beating she’s just taken - maybe more. She straightens her shoulders. “You’re surprised?”

Her tone is colder than she wants it to be, but it’s the only way she can keep her voice from shaking. Buffy, meanwhile, is rubbing her hand over her mouth the way she does when she’s worried.

“I’m - Stevie, I’m not surprised, I’m just - why? Why would you do-” she gestures at Stevie- “this?” Stevie looks down at herself, the short straight line of her body, the blood-spattered shirt and trousers. “Why not just volunteer as a nurse?”

She feels a strange and formless rage building inside her chest. “Why, are you worried you’ll have to rescue me? Afraid the _military training_ they gave you wasn’t good enough to protect your scrawny friend?”

Buffy’s voice is low and even as she says, “You know that’s not true-”

“Do I?” Stevie is shaking now. The adrenaline of the fight is still thrumming in her veins and she is not fully convinced that Buffy is here in the flesh, standing in front of her after six months of utter silence. “You seemed pretty eager to leave me behind-”

“This is _war_ , Stevie,” Buffy snaps, nostrils flaring, and her voice is strangled. “This isn’t some back-alley _brawl_ that you can just - just - throw yourself into! You could get killed. Do you realize that? You could _die._ ” She blinks rapidly and Stevie sees she’s trying to hold back tears. All at once the anger drains out of her, and in its place she feels only a bone-deep loneliness.

“Don’t you think I know that, Buff?”

She asks this as gently as she can. “Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? It’s - I know I could die. But you could die, too. Anyone could die. And I can’t just stay at home and do nothing while everyone else defends my freedom. I can’t let someone else die for me.”

Tears do spill out of Buffy’s eyes then, and she dashes them away angrily. “You’re so -” She makes a frustrated sound. “You - why not a medic, Stevie? Just answer me that.”

"You know I can't do that," Stevie says. "I've got no training. I'd be even more useless than I am here at home. But I can fight, Buffy. You know I can, and people are dying."

She meets her eyes. "I've got no right to do any less. I can't save a life, but maybe - maybe I can stop one from being in danger in the first place. And if the only reason they won't let me do that is because I'm a woman, well, then-"

Buffy interrupts. "No, no, no. You're a _tiny_ woman, Stevie. Look at you. Even if you _were_ a boy they wouldn't let you in, because they'd think you were twelve. You've got asthma. You-"

"I'm doing this, Buff," she snaps, and she doesn't want to snap at Buffy but she doesn't know how to make her understand. "I have to. I just-" She looks around, at a loss, trying to figure out how to explain it. "I can't just do nothing. I haven't earned that. I need to go. I need to serve." She knows she sounds desperate, but she is. “I know what my life is worth.”

Buffy shuts her eyes for a long moment. “I can’t stop you,” she says at last. “And I should have written, and I’m sorry.” She exhales slowly, carefully, and looks at Stevie.

"We’re shipping out tomorrow. Can you take a night off from getting your ass kicked and see me off in style?” The corner of her mouth twitches. Stevie’s matches it, curving into a smile, and she throws her arms around her best friend. “Thanks, Buff,” she murmurs into her hair. “Won’t let you down.”

Buffy holds her out at arm’s length, examines her, and sighs. "You have a self-destructive streak a mile long, you know that, Rogers?"

She grins then, a big wolfy smile. “I don’t mind the hair, though. What d’you tell them your name is?”

“Steve.”

"Steve," she says, and raises her eyebrows. "I'll get used to it. Now can we please find you a shirt that’s not covered in blood?"

\--

Half an hour later she is clean, new shirt and trousers, and she’s trying to reason with her hair.

"Come on," Buffy laughs, swinging herself around the doorframe. “I want some _whiskey_."

Stevie flips her bangs once more, trying to keep them from falling into her eyes, and finally just rakes her hands through the whole mess and turns away from the mirror. "You look very handsome," Buffy purrs, and Stevie feels something shiver low in her belly. “Where are we going?”

Buffy smiles wickedly.

\--

The two men making a beeline toward them put Stevie on the defensive, until Buffy elbows her and mouths, _surprise!_ "There you are," she says, kissing one of them on the cheek, and grabs the other one by the hand. "This is Stevie, my best friend. Stevie, this is Hugh, be nice to him, he's shipping out with us tomorrow," and then she slips her arm through the first boy's and sails toward the cotton-candy counter, leaving Stevie and Hugh to wander along in their wake. The lights of the Stark Expo are dazzling around them, and she can hear shouts and music and laughter from every direction.

"So you're-" Hugh says, and tries to figure out where to go from there. "A girl, yes," finishes Stevie lightly. "I just like pants."

"And crew cuts," he says, but he's smiling, and he sounds sincere enough when he continues, "It suits you."

They walk after Buffy and her soldier in a companionable silence.

\--

The man on the stage - _Howard Stark_ , whispers Buffy, _he works with S.H.I.E.L.D.,_ as she jabs her in the side -  is making a fool of himself, but Stevie likes him, can see a real mind under the showmanship and the razzle-dazzle. "I did say it was a prototype," he's laughing, and the crowd is laughing with him, when she catches a glimpse of a sign that says U.S. ARMY. All of the noise in the fair - all of the noise in the world, it seems - recedes, blurring in her ears until she feels as though she's underwater, and she moves toward the booth, the crowd parting for her like she's in a dream. Buffy turns a moment later to look for her - sees her departing back, sees the sign - and groans. "Hang on," she whispers to the boys, and darts after Stevie.

\--

"Really?" she hears from behind her. She turns and there is Buffy, foot tapping, expectant. "I asked for one night, Rogers. You think this place will be different? You know, they're gonna _arrest_ you one of these times, and then-"

Stevie hisses out a _sshhh_ and drags her around the corner. "Just - Buffy - go enjoy the fair. Just let me try. I- I have to try." She swallows hard. “Please, Buff.”

Buffy looks down, her eyelashes sweeping shadows across her cheeks, and Stevie can't read her face. She takes a deep breath, readying herself to argue, and then Buffy’s eyes meet hers and in them she sees a sad acceptance.

"Be careful," she whispers, and she smiles ruefully as she puts her hand on Stevie's shoulder. She straightens Stevie's collar, smooths the points. "Steve Rogers," she proclaims, looking at her handiwork. "U.S. Army."

She hugs Buffy to her, cups the back of her head, her dark hair warm and soft, and again feels that unnameable tremor.

"Don't win the war 'til I get there," she calls as Buffy walks away from the tent.

Buffy wheels around smartly and salutes her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve Rogers joins the army.

There is, shockingly, no one else trying to enlist during the Stark Expo.

The man who leads Stevie back into a curtain-walled room is tall and broad-shouldered, and he does a good job of hiding his disdain but she’s used to seeing it now, knows what to look for in his eyes. She doesn’t speak more than she has to.

Steven Grant Rogers.

July 4, 1918.

Featherweight boxing.

Wait. What county are they in?

What county-

The man leaves the room and Stevie feels something cold slithering around in her belly. She looks at the gap in the curtains, wondering if she can get all the way outside before anyone notices, and she’s halfway off the paper-covered table when a man ducks into the little room.

“Ah,” he says, and in his next words she can hear an accent. “Cold feet?”

“No - no sir,” Stevie stammers hastily. “Just wanted to stretch a little. Before the physical.” She’s sweating like she’s just been sprinting, breathing almost that hard too. The man looks at her curiously. Then he fans a sheaf of files out in his hands.

She sees the 4F stamped on each one and her heart sinks.

“Sir, I can explain. I only-”

He holds up a hand.

“This is your… fifth attempt?” he asks, tapping the files. He already knows the answer. “In as many cities, correct?”

Stevie’s tongue feels like lead in her mouth. “Yes, sir.”

“Sir,” the man chuckles. “So very formal, we are.”

She looks at him, confused. This is not the tone she’d expected from the man she assumes has come in to arrest her. Then again, she thinks, she’s never been arrested. Maybe it’s fun for them, the way cats will bat a mouse around before they kill it. Maybe she is supposed to confess. She realizes then that he is staring at her intently over his tiny round glasses, and she drops her gaze.

“Do you want to be in the army, Steven Grant Rogers?”

His voice is soft.

Her answer is little more than a whisper.

“More than anything, sir.”

If it’s a trap then so be it. She’s done lying.

He nods and turns to her latest file, makes a show of thumbing through it.

“You want to kill some Nazis?”

She recognizes now that the accent is German. The man’s gaze flicks up to hers, calm and cold, assessing.

“Is this a test?”

He shrugs, mirroring the movement with a downward turn of the corners of his mouth. “Yes.”

Stevie closes her eyes and sees a girl silhouetted by the sun, her hand outstretched.

“I don’t want to kill anyone, sir,” she says at last. “I don’t like bullies.”

She meets his eyes.

“No matter where they’re from.”

He smiles very, very slightly. Stevie keeps her gaze steady, waiting. Now he will slam his fist on the table and say _get out_. He will say _ineligible on your asthma alone_. He will say _I am saving your life, son._ He will send her away.

Or - she has almost forgotten, and the thought resurfaces with a bite - he will take her into custody. He will arrest her, and they will take her to jail, and then they will discover that she is a girl, and then what? It’s bad enough to lie about where you’re from. She can only imagine it is doubly criminal to try and enlist lying about who you _are_.

She tries to breathe evenly, tries to keep the strangling panic from climbing any further up her throat. “Look,” she says, her voice strong and clear. “Just give me a chance.”

He considers this for a moment, and she fights a wave of terror as he turns to make sure the curtains meet at their edges, sealing the room as much as possible given that it’s essentially a tent. She wants to scream but somehow she keeps breathing quietly. He sits down.

“I think,” he says, uncapping a pen, “that persistence is a virtue. Would you agree?”

She feels something new claw its way into her lungs. She thinks it might be hope.

Her voice cracks on the word. “Yes.”

“Very good.”

He is writing now, small cramped letters that she can’t read from where she’s perched on the table. Then he stands, brushing his lab coat off briskly, and rummages in a pocket. He comes up with a stamp and an ink pad, and he stands there for a moment just holding them.

"I am German, you know,” he says abruptly.

She nods.

“I am not a Nazi.”

She nods again.

“I know what it is to be judged wrongly, Steven. To be denied.”

There is a tiny flare of something in his eyes - bitterness, she thinks - that dies as quickly as it ignited.

“I do not like bullies either, my friend.”

He brings his hand up and stamps her file and it’s so quick that she doesn’t even realize it’s happening, and then she is holding it in her hands, her fifth file, her fifth and last try, and looking up at her from across her own face is a bright red 1A.

“My name is Abraham Erskine,” he says, and she tears her gaze away from the file. “I am a scientist.”

He extends his hand and she seizes it, shakes it hard. His eyes flicker.

“I hope that we will have reason to meet again, Steven Rogers. I hope it very much.”

Stevie’s entire soul is doing cartwheels, but she manages to smile somewhat normally.

“Thank you, Dr. Erskine,” she says. “You won’t regret this.”

Erskine nods, makes another little face that she can’t quite read.

  
“Will you be ready to leave tomorrow?”


	5. and peggy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy Carter is a lighthouse, a safe harbor, a goddamn inspiration, and she will be having precisely none of your shit.

The first time Stevie faints during basic training is on a ninety-degree day, the last mile of a twenty-mile run. They are running in full uniform, helmets and guns and ammunition strapped to their bodies, and she is approximately half a mile behind the rest of the new recruits. She is barely running, doing a sort of jouncing trot-walk, when her foot catches a stone and she falls hard onto her knees. She stands back up immediately and then her vision is filled with snow. She sways, takes one step, and then there is darkness.

She wakes barely thirty seconds later - barely a swoon, she tells herself, not even a real faint - and scrambles to her feet. No one has noticed; the truck that carries the colonel and Agent Carter is up ahead, with the pack. She shakes her head and takes off running, a real run now, sprinting to catch up. She makes it back to camp just ten minutes after the others, pouring sweat, clutching her side.

“Rogers, you made it,” she hears from behind her, and she takes a deep breath as she turns. Gil Hodge looms over her, ruddy-cheeked and smirking. “Kinda hoped you were gonna die this time.”

Stevie holds his gaze for a second longer, then spins away, toward the barracks. She won’t be able to shower until tonight, when the rest of the men are asleep, but she can at least get out of this uniform. She gets about three steps before she is yanked backwards, her neck jolting painfully, and lands on her back. Hodge leans down. “Whoops,” he says, his breath blowing hot and sour into her face. “Caught your pack-strap there, soldier.”

He watches, smiling cruelly, as she gets up slowly, painfully, and resettles her pack on her shoulders. “Best be careful, Rogers,” he sneers.

She makes it to the barracks before the tears come, but just barely. She folds herself onto her cot, buries her face in her filthy jacket, and cries. She was a fool to think she could do this, to think that she could ever be something more than a skinny kid from Brooklyn. She was a fool to think she could be a soldier, let alone some kind of hero. She was given a chance and her body just - won’t let her have it. She doesn't belong here. She balls up a fist and punches it into her leg, still weak from running. She grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes, wiping away the tears, and sits up. 

“No,” she whispers.

“No?”

She whips around so fast she falls off the cot.

“Agent Carter!” she yelps, leaping to her feet, snapping off a salute and coming to attention. “How long - how did - uh, did you - uh, what can I do for you? Ma'am?” She prays silently that Carter will take her flushed face and red eyes as exhaustion.

“At ease, soldier,” Carter says, her voice cool and faintly amused. Stevie relaxes a fraction of an inch. Carter comes around, sits on the cot, pats the space next to her. Stevie’s mouth goes dry.

“Agent Carter, I’m - not exactly - uh, the run was -” She gestures helplessly at herself, feeling her grimy uniform slough dust onto the floor as she does.

“I’m sure it’s fine. Sit.”

She sits.

“Rogers - may I call you Steve?”

“Oh, um. Sure.”

“Good. You may call me Peggy, if you like.”

_Great, I’ll be sure to do that, and then I’ll call the colonel Chester and we’ll all go for a milkshake._

“Thank you, Agent Carter.”

There is the faintest twitch of her red-velvet lips, a ghost of a smile.

“Steve, how do you think I got here?”

“To America?”

Peggy sighs.

“To Camp Lehigh. To the army.”

Stevie shrugs, willing the motion to be as manly as possible.

“I was going to get married,” Peggy says, her eyes looking somewhere far away. “I was a codebreaker - they let women do that here, too, I think? It was a sort of… secretarial job. It wasn’t combat, it wasn’t anything on the front lines. We had an office. It was all very… safe.”

Stevie nods.

“My brother Michael, he -” Stevie sees a muscle in Peggy’s cheek twitch as her jaw clenches. “My brother Michael thought I should be doing fieldwork. He’d taught me to fight and shoot and what have you when we were children - he never treated me like a girl. We were always equals, and he thought… he thought I was meant for some great adventure. Something bigger and better than marrying Fred Wells.”

She looks down at her lap.

“He got me an offer with the Special Operations Executive - under Churchill?”

Stevie shakes her head, no, she doesn’t know it.

“They’re still active over there. They use a lot of women because they don’t attract any attention.” She gives a wry laugh. “Spies, sabotage. Daring exploits. All wearing skirts.”

Stevie flushes, hopes Peggy doesn't see the color rising in her cheeks.

“I didn’t take the offer,” Peggy continues, frowning at the memory. “Fred didn’t think it was a good idea. He was very prudent.” She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “Michael died a few weeks before the wedding. He was killed in Germany.”

“I’m so sorry,” Stevie murmurs, and she almost puts a hand on Peggy’s before snatching it back at the last moment.

“I left Fred then, and I joined up. I just walked out of my life and into the SOE. And even though it was full of women, no one took us seriously. Churchill himself said we were an asset and still it was all you could do to get an assignment, get any kind of _work_ done. But every time I wanted to leave I thought about Michael, and about how he’d wanted more for me, and I stayed. I took every mission I could, the impossible ones, the thankless ones, and I made them worth it. And then they transferred me here.”

She waves her hand, indicating the barracks. “Do you know what this camp is?”

Stevie is fairly sure that her tongue is dissolving inside her mouth along with all the bones in her body. This is the longest conversation she has had with anyone since Erskine recruited her, and the only thing she can think is _Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers, you are a boy you are Steve Rogers, Steven Grant Rogers_ and she realizes Peggy is still waiting for an answer. She clears her throat.

“Basic training?”

Peggy leans in, her face serious. “It is much, much more than that, Rogers.”

Stevie isn’t sure if she should meet her eyes, drops her gaze to Peggy’s throat, finally settles on the stickpin in her lapel. Peggy leans in even further, and Stevie wonders frantically if she’s being _too_ masculine, if Peggy is going to _kiss_ her, and the thought sends a weird thrill up her spine. She leans back, just in case, just a little. Peggy doesn’t seem to notice, and she says, “I really can’t say any more. I just -”

She puts a hand on Stevie's shoulder, ignoring the dust that fluffs into the air. “I wanted you to know that I understand what it’s like, having doors shut in your face because of who you are. And I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t let it stop you, because I see a lot of potential in you.”

She smiles then, standing up.

“I think you are meant for a great adventure, Steve Rogers.”

Then she is gone, and Stevie sits alone in the hot, still room, looking down at her muddy boots.

 

\--

 

She notices Peggy watching her more during the next few weeks, and so does Hodge. There is a very unpleasant altercation one afternoon after weapons training, when Hodge suggests loudly that Stevie has only made it this far without being sent home because she is “putting it to Queen Victoria”. Stevie does her best to let this go - soldiers are strictly forbidden from fighting within the ranks - but her obvious discomfort emboldens Hodge, whose taunting escalates until he is doing a full pantomime, gun bobbing at his hips. At that point Stevie punches Hodge, which is followed immediately by Hodge slamming her to the ground, blacking her eyes and bloodying her nose with astonishing speed. Then there is the cough of a pistol, a high-pitched whine, and a small explosion in the grass about a foot from her head. Hodge leaps backwards off of her, eyes wide with shock.

“ _Really?_ ” demands Peggy, holstering the weapon as she yanks Stevie off the ground. “ _Really._ Absolutely  _not_ on my watch. Or anyone else’s. You are responsible for each others’ _lives_. You are _soldiers_. I expect better than this.”

She is, Stevie realizes, looking at her. Not Hodge.

She is furious with Stevie, too.

She feels a surge of shame and anger. “Peggy, I was only -”

Peggy’s gaze silences her.

“Private Rogers,” she says in a clipped, cold voice. “You will do well to remember that you are speaking to a superior officer, and that every soldier in this program is being closely monitored.”

She shifts her gaze to Hodge, but Stevie can tell the words are still directed at her. "Furthermore,” she says, reaching out to angle his shoulders and kicking at his feet, “I am more than capable of dealing with this kind of disruption.” She maneuvers Hodge a bit more, then stands back, considering. He smirks.

“Private Hodge?”

“Yes, your Majes-”

The punch snaps his head so far to the right Stevie hears his neck crack. Peggy set him in a solid stance, and he only stumbles a few steps before he regains his balance. His eyes, when he raises his head, are burning with anger, but his face is carefully blank. He works his jaw back and forth, staring at her.

She looks at both of them, her face disgusted, and shakes her hand out briskly. She lifts her voice to the rest of the company.

“As punishment for the time we have wasted here with this little display of masculinity, there will be another round of drilling instead of supper. Report back here at 1800 hours.”

There is a wave of disgruntled muttering, but it dies almost immediately under Peggy’s withering stare. “Dismissed,” she snaps. She turns on her heel and stalks back toward the officers’ tent.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you think Captain America doesn't have a little bit of a death wish, you're kidding yourself.

The thing with the grenade happens a month and a half later.

Peggy hasn’t spoken to her since that day in the barracks, the day she fought Hodge - but Stevie has caught her watching still, standing on the edge of the field with the colonel, deep in conversation. She knows better now than to acknowledge her, to wave or smile or nod, so she looks away and scrambles under the barbed wire. 

She apologized that night, after the evening drill, snuck away and slipped a note under the door to the officers’ quarters. She heard the rustle of footsteps, of paper scooped off the floor, but the door never opened and after a time she stole back to her bunk. The next morning Peggy looked at her during breakfast, held her gaze for a moment. Then she looked at her watch and left the mess hall.

Now Stevie tries to ignore the eyes on her, tells herself they don’t mean anything as she flings herself up and over the net-covered wall. Hodge grabs her ankle and she kicks him in the shoulder. She lands on her feet; she’s been landing on her feet more lately. She’s been running faster - still at the back of the pack, but now she can keep them in sight for the whole run, and she gets back to camp just five minutes after they do. She can disarm another soldier in three moves, if he’s close to her size, and take down a larger cadet in six. She hopes Peggy can see the improvement. She hopes Peggy knows that it’s partly because of her that Stevie’s still here, still fighting. 

The run that day is a tidy twenty-five miles in full gear, without water. Stevie feels herself getting fuzzy around the edges, feels herself floating away with the heat she can see shimmering in the air around her. She doesn’t hear the challenge Colonel Phillips issues, half a mile in front of her, can’t hear his shouts over her labored breathing, and when she reaches the flagpole the other soldiers have all but given up. They’re clambering onto each others’ backs, jumping halfheartedly - one of them throws a helmet that barely misses his own head on the way down - and the colonel gives a disgusted grunt and waves the pack onward. Stevie finds Peggy’s eyes, raises her eyebrows. Peggy mouths, _Get the flag_ , and darts her eyes upward.

Stevie walks toward the flagpole, still panting. She hears the engine die as the colonel turns off the truck, but she can’t make out what he says to Peggy as he folds his arms, leaning back in his seat. 

She takes off her helmet, tips her head back to look up at the flag. She thinks for a moment about climbing trees, fences, Buffy extending her hand to pull her up. She follows the hand, follows Buffy, tries to find a way into her analytical mind. She looks at the flagpole like it is a puzzle, something to be solved, and as her eyes travel over its smooth surface she sees only a small dark-haired girl about to knock out a much larger opponent. Her body moves of its own accord, before her mind even understands its intent, and then she is working her fingers in under the rusty pin at the base of the pole, wrenching it free with a shower of red flakes. She steps neatly to the side and looks up, watches the flag stream upward as it falls. The pole bounces off the ground before it settles, and she walks the length of it to the tattered flag. She unclips it, walks over to the truck. The colonel’s face doesn't move as he rips the flag from her hands, but she can see something like fury in his eyes, his tightened features. Peggy takes the flag and pats the seat next to her. She does not smile, but she holds Stevie’s gaze for a moment, and Stevie thinks: _Proud. She’s proud of me._ She swings herself into the truck, and as they drive past the rest of the cadets she can’t resist winking at Hodge. 

The colonel practically shoves her out of the truck when they get back to camp, brushing past her without a word. Peggy gives her a look that might be apologetic and then hurries away after him. Stevie watches them as they duck into the officers’ tent, and in the moment before the door-flap obscures her view she thinks she sees a familiar face, light glinting off a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses. 

The pack of cadets announces itself first with a dust cloud about a mile distant, and five minutes later all of them are thundering past Stevie into the mess, red-faced and sweating. Hodge’s shoulder slams into her, spinning her clockwise, but she doesn’t fall, and she sees a flash of disappointment on his face as he jogs away. One of the other recruits - she thinks his name is Roberts, maybe - claps her on the back. “Slick move back there, Rogers,” he pants, and he gives her a genuine smile as he lopes past. Stevie flushes all the way up to her hairline, feeling strange and delighted. _Slick move back there, Rogers_. It reminds her of Buffy, her sly proud smile when Stevie lands a good hit at practice. _Atta girl, Stevie. Hit him again_. It makes her almost proud of herself. It makes her feel _capable_. She wipes her forehead with her sleeve and ducks inside.

\--

They are doing calisthenics when it happens. Stevie is imagining the grisly death of whoever invented jumping jacks, her form deteriorating at the same rate that her ire rises, and her eyes are focused squarely on the center of Hodge’s back, right between his shoulderblades opening and closing like wings as he pistons his arms. _He’s like a machine_ , she thinks, trying to match his pace. _I can be a machine_. 

The thing flies into her field of vision from above, from the right, and it lands on the grass with a tiny _pth_ of a sound, rolls a few inches, and stops. She squints at the thing, trying to keep her eyes fixed on it while she jounces them around in her skull, and then she hears the colonel bellow “ _GRENADE!_ ”

All at once the thing resolves in her vision, clear and sharp against the trampled grass. _Grenade_. The word thuds in her brain, and before she can form a second thought she lunges forward. _One_. The soldiers are scattering, running, she hears wordless cries of fear and it is two steps, maybe three steps, and she takes them through air _two_ that feels like molasses, floats down toward the ground like a falling leaf, and then her palms strike the grass and she _three_ curls into a circle, drawing her knees into her ribs, her body a fist clenched tightly around a small deadly seed. “ _GET BACK_ ,” she hears herself scream, high and wild but ringingly clear. _Four_. “GET _BACK!”_ She curls tighter, her eyes squeezed shut, her brain filled with white light and certainty and terror, and she counts _five._

Then nothing.

 

Then nothing.

 

She opens her eyes. 

 

There is a pair of scuffed brown shoes in front of her. She stares at the shoes, tries to make them make sense. The sun is suddenly very bright, and she raises a hand to shield her eyes. The shoes move slightly. She follows the legs growing out of them up, up, and then without warning she is staring almost directly up the nose of Dr. Abraham Erskine. She unfolds herself and looks down at the dummy grenade. She looks back up at the man who let her into the army. 

“Is this another test?”

Erskine smiles.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Into the machine, and some body horror.

By the time Erskine opens the door to the tiny room that they hustled Stevie off to, she has just about ground her teeth into dust. She paces in circles, trying to keep the sweat on her body from cooling and making her clammy. Her head snaps up when she hears the handle turn.  
“Dr. Erskine, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I-”  
“Shh, shh, Steven.” He makes a calm-down gesture, patting at the air. “Sit.”  
She remains standing. “Dr. Erskine - sir - I know you got me here and I am grateful to you, but what the hell is this?” She sweeps her arm out, indicating the cell. “Am I being punished? Did I do something-”  
“Steven.” Erskine takes off his glasses, rubs the bridge of his nose. “Please. Sit.”  
She sits, the cot letting out a distressed creak as she does. She folds her arms and stares at Erskine, waiting.  
He pulls a chair from under the sink in the corner and sinks into it, then leans his elbows onto his knees and steeples his fingers. “Have you ever heard of Project Rebirth?”  
Stevie shakes her head.  
“No, you wouldn’t have,” he mutters, almost to himself. “Very top secret. Very, very top secret. Well.”  
He flattens his hands, palms together, and looks hard at Stevie. After a time, he speaks.  
“Why did you jump on the grenade today?”  
Stevie blinks. She clears her throat.  
“What?”  
“Why did you jump on the grenade?”  
He enunciates each word, his accent sharpening them into small thin blades.  
Stevie looks down at her lap, thinks about her next words.  
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”  
She hears rustling as Erskine scoots his chair closer.  
“You would have been hurt.”  
She lifts her eyes to meet his.  
“Yeah, but-” She has never had to put this into words, and she flounders around a bit before she finds the thread. “I made that choice for myself. I know that I’d be willing to die, and I don’t - I can’t make that decision for someone else.”  
Erskine’s eyebrows draw together, but he doesn’t say anything. She tries again.  
“I just mean that - if it comes down to it - if there’s -” She blows out a frustrated breath. “If it’s down to my life or someone else’s, and it’s within my power to decide, it’s always gonna be me.”  
“Always going to be you. To die?”  
“To - to whatever! To do what I can to protect someone else. I don’t have it in me to keep myself safe at someone else’s expense. I guess that makes me stupid and reckless but I’m just not wired any other way.” She clenches her fists tightly, fighting back tears of anger and confusion. “Is that why I’m in here? Because I was reckless? Because I should have run away?”  
Erskine looks at her levelly.  
“I’m not sorry,” she says hotly, feeling her nails dig into her palms. “I’d do it again.”  
Erskine holds her gaze for a long moment, and then he bows his head. Her heart sinks.  
“Whatever it takes,” he murmurs, his eyes searching her face. “You are prepared to do whatever it takes.”  
She can’t quite tell whether it’s a question, but she nods.  
“I knew that the moment I met you,” says Erskine, and his expression softens. “Today, I think, you have finally convinced Colonel Phillips.”  
He leans forward.  
“Steven.”  
She waits.  
“Would you like to change the course of history?”

\--

The machine is cold on the inside, and it doesn’t help that she’s stripped down to an undershirt and trousers. There are nurses swabbing her arms and jabbing her with needles, and Erskine comes over to strap her in. He sees the panic in her eyes and smiles kindly. “All ready, Private Rogers?”  
She grimaces. “Tell me again why you picked me.”  
“Because you are weak,” Erskine says matter-of-factly, “but you are good.” His face clouds for a moment, his eyes going somewhere faraway. “The serum amplifies what is inside. We can make any man strong, but we cannot make him good. That must come from within.”  
He says something in German then, something Stevie doesn’t catch, and then he seems to come back into himself.  
“Besides,” he adds with a wry smile, “you are already in the machine.”  
Stevie laughs despite herself. She doesn’t see the smile disappear as they close the door to the chamber, doesn’t see the anxiety on Howard Stark’s face as he contemplates the control panel in front of him.  
The chamber closes with a hiss, and almost immediately the glass in front of her face starts to fog with her breath. She hears a small voice coming from somewhere behind her head.  
“Private Rogers!” Stark sounds edgy. “You can hear me, but it’s a one-way channel. You better be ready, because you can’t tell us otherwise.”  
“Great,” Stevie mutters. She shifts against the metal of the chamber.  
“Stop moving,” comes Stark’s voice again. “We can tell you’re moving.”  
Stevie rolls her eyes. At least the irritation distracts her from the fear.  
“Okay, Rogers. Breathe as regularly as you can, okay?”

She closes her eyes, but they snap open of their own accord when the needles bite into her skin, her muscles, her _bones_. She can feel the points digging into her, through her, can actually feel her flesh cleaving apart up and down her arms and legs. She is dimly aware that tears are streaming down her face and her breath is hitching through her gritted teeth. She tries to calm herself, tries to go somewhere else, tries to count out her breaths like Buffy’s dad taught her, but she only makes it about two seconds before her chest heaves raggedly, involuntarily, sobbing in a purely physical response to this pain, this pain like she has never known. She hears a whirring sound and then suddenly there is new pain, different pain, a searing, swelling feeling in her veins, and she is afraid her body will simply burst, they will open the capsule and there will be nothing but a heap of blood and guts, still steaming, here lies Stevie Rogers, who thought she could make something of herself, her blood is on fire and her bones are melting and she cannot move, strapped in at the hips, pinned like a butterfly by the needles sunk into her limbs, and then there is a blinding white light, and the light is killing her, it is flaying her, it sinks teeth into her heart and her brain and her lungs, and finally Stevie opens her mouth and she screams.

She hears Stark’s voice faintly, from miles and miles away, and he’s shouting, “We’re shutting it down! Rogers, it’s okay, we’re shutting it down!” and somehow this penetrates the fog, the shroud of pain. Another scream wrenches its way out of her but this one has edges and texture and it says _“NO!”_ as loudly as she can manage it, clotted with agony but clear enough, and then she is silent and the pain doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop and then, all at once, it stops.

Distantly the needles slide out of her flesh, an inconsequential hurt in the face of what she has just been through. She feels a curious itching wash over her body, like someone’s trailing fingertips, and a shudder works through her. The capsule presses in on her and she is almost afraid she will scream again, and then there is a shadow across the glass. The front of the chamber lifts away from her, sucking cold air across her sweat-drenched skin in its wake. Erskine jabs the button at her hip and she pitches forward, her knees slamming into the floor.  
She looks up at him.  
“Did it work?” she asks, and her voice is deeper, stronger. He laughs and extends a hand, which she takes. She stands, noticing how fluidly her legs unfold, and then she realizes she is looking down at Erskine. She realizes that his hand, which she is still clutching, is almost smaller than hers. She feels her lungs expanding, contracting, feels the rush of her breath like a bellows. She looks down, past Erskine, and she almost falls back down. _I’m huge_ , she thinks nonsensically. _I’m six feet tall, I must be, the ground is so far away, what the-_  
“How do you feel?” asks Peggy, walking toward her. Stark stays behind the control panel, his face carefully blank, a lock of hair falling out of place onto his forehead.  
Peggy is at least six inches shorter than her. She revises her initial estimate upward. _Six-two. I’m six-two. I wonder what weight class I’d be in now._ She says, marveling again at her new voice, “Taller.”  
She stretches her arms out, swivels her head around. What she can see of herself is sleekly muscled, radiating vitality; every inch of her brims with power, and she feels a surge of joy so strong that she laughs aloud. “It worked,” she says to Erskine delightedly. She bounces on the balls of her feet, fights the urge to break into song or dance or a flat-out run. “It worked!”  
Colonel Phillips’ voice is low and dangerous when it rings out from the observation deck.  
“Dr. Erskine.”  
Rage seems to crackle from the speaker.  
“Is that a woman?”

Several things happen then.

Stevie feels the blood drain from her face, her heart lurching inside her chest. She reaches out a hand - to Erskine, to Peggy, she doesn’t know - and she is opening her mouth to speak when the bomb explodes.  
Even as the floor below the observation deck blows apart, a man heaves himself over the railing. He shouts in German, pulling a pistol from his coat as he staggers to his feet, and before Stevie can even move he swings the pistol up and shoots Dr. Erskine squarely in the chest.  
She throws herself to the ground next to the doctor, pressing her hands into the wound, trying desperately to stop the blood gushing out from under her hands, bubbling through her fingers. She hears a horrible whistling sucking sound, and Erskine tries to speak.  
“No, no, no,” she says, pressing down more firmly. “Don’t talk, save your strength-” Her vision blurs with tears and she shakes her head hard, blinking them away.  
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I should have told you, I’m so sorry.” His hand crawls up over hers, his fingers cold. He coughs. She leans in, puts the cup of her ear to his lips. She hears a soft rushing sound like the ocean, and underneath it the faintest of whispers.  
“You are good,” he breathes, and she stifles a sob. His hand tightens on hers, his blood already sticky between their fingers. “And now… you are strong.”  
His grip relaxes, and she pulls her head back to see his eyes go vacant. She sits back on her heels.  
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers again. There is a clang then, and she looks up to see the man with the pistol wrench a metal box off of the control panel. Howard Stark lies on the floor, his face covered in blood. He tries to grab the man’s ankle as he darts past, but his hand won’t close and his arm falls limply back to the tile. His eyes meet Stevie’s.  
She gets up, _surges_ up, feels her body thrumming with rage and sorrow and something else, something new and frightening. She looks down at Erskine one last time, and then she is slamming out the door of the lab into the sunlight.  
Then she is running.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Star-Spangled Man With A Plan!

The light outside is bright and harsh and everything is so _loud_. She can hear someone scolding a child somewhere in the distance, she can hear the ocean seven blocks down the road, she can hear her own blood rushing through her body and - _and_ \- she can hear the labored breathing of the man she is chasing. Her bare feet slap against the pavement and she doesn’t even feel it. She can’t feel anything beyond how fast she’s moving, how precarious it feels, as if she’s one step away from pitching face-first into the ground. She skids, actually skids around a corner and feels no pain as she pinwheels her way through a cluster of trash cans. The running man is growing larger in her field of vision. She feels a fierce joy in her chest and she puts her head down, pumps her arms. The man slams his way into a car, throwing the driver onto the street, and Stevie slows for a fraction of a second before she sees the driver lift his head and then she smashes into the back of the car. She clambers up the back and onto the roof, fitting her fingers into the open window, and grips the doorframe so hard it crumples beneath her fingers. The man swears and slews the car from right to left, trying to shake her off. She presses herself down into the sun-warmed metal. Time seems to be moving rather slowly, now that she is on top of the car, and she feels her thoughts form carefully, luxuriously. _I wonder_ , she thinks, looking at her right hand, _if I could -_

She tightens the grip of her left hand, rolls her right shoulder just a bit, and then balls up her fist and slams it into the roof of the car.  
The sound of the metal tearing is sharp and loud and exhilarating, and Stevie laughs even as she grabs the man by the hair and yanks. The car pitches wildly, catches a wheel, and before it can even start to roll she is leaping free, landing on her feet, completely dumbfounded by her own new instincts.

The car rolls completely over and is starting a second revolution when it slams into the post on the dock; it comes to rest on its roof and the man forces his door open. He staggers out, wrenches the case free, and starts running. Stevie barrels into him less than a second later, pinning him to the ground. He has the pistol in his hand again and she smashes his wrist on the pavement. She feels the bones crack beneath her fingers, feels them grinding together as she squeezes. The man sucks in a breath and then spits in her face. She recoils, letting go of his shattered hand, and he hisses a laugh.  
“Cut off one head,” he wheezes, his breathing compromised by her knee on his chest. “Two more shall take its place.” His tongue moves in his mouth, almost obscenely, and she realizes too late what he is doing and seizes his jaw. She hears the crunch of the false tooth and she sweeps her fingers through his mouth but the poison is already in his throat, bubbling around her fingers. She pulls her hand back, sees his lips moving.  
“Hail…HYDRA...” he whispers. His eyes are filled with hatred even as they lose focus.

She takes her knee off his chest and sits heavily beside the body, wiping her hand on her fraying trousers. Dimly, she is aware that the dock is filling with police cars, lights flashing, sirens whooping. Uniformed officers are shouting, waving their arms at bystanders, trying to form a perimeter. She hears the crackle-whine of a flashbulb.  
A black car pulls up and the driver’s door bursts open. Phillips walks up to her, arms folded. He looks down at her from where he stands.  
“Rogers.”  
She gets to her feet and salutes. He snorts. She sees Peggy get out of another car, gun drawn, her mouth set in a hard line. Phillips puts a hand on his own holster.  
“Get in the goddamn car.”

She folds herself into the back seat and watches him through the window. He kicks at the dead man, whose head bobbles slightly. He stoops and picks up the metal box, which Stevie sees now is a case, and snaps it open. She can hear his cry of disgust and dismay through the window. The vials - twelve of them, it looks like - are smashed, contents soaked into the spongy material meant to cradle them, to keep this from happening. Phillips slams the case and shoves it roughly into Peggy’s hands. He says something to her, then turns to the waiting officers. “The body comes with us,” he shouts. “Clear the scene.”  
He stalks back to the car, leaving Peggy to orchestrate what remains of the situation.

“Sir-” Stevie tries as he throws the car into gear.  
“No, Rogers.” His voice is vibrating with rage. “You don’t talk right now. You don’t talk again until I say you can. Are we clear?”  
Stevie opens her mouth, shuts it, nods once.  
“Good,” he says, and stomps on the accelerator.

\--

“Get her a shirt,” Phillips snaps as he steers Stevie through an unfamiliar building. “Something with a collar. And sleeves. Just - get her a shirt.” She can’t tell who this is directed at, but when they arrive at the room with the metal table there is a shirt folded neatly atop it.  
She undoes the buttons and shoves her arms in as Phillips takes one of the two chairs. He leans forward heavily, steepling his fingers, and raises his eyebrows at the other chair. She sits down, rolling the sleeves of the shirt up. She buttons it all the way to the collar, concealing her grimy undershirt, the hollow of her throat. She waits. She doesn’t want to speak first. She presses her hands together between her knees, flexes her bare toes against the cool floor. She thinks about the dead man, the man she couldn’t stop, the man who clearly destroyed something important. She thinks about Erskine and that thought breaks her.

“Sir, I-”  
“Did I say it was time for you to speak?” he thunders. She lowers her gaze. She hears the chair creak as he leans across the table.  
“Look at me, Rogers.”  
She meets his eyes.  
“Do you understand what you have cost us here today?”  
She doesn’t speak.  
“Do you understand the jeopardy that you have single-handedly placed your country in? Is that what you wanted? Whose side are you even _on-_ ”  
She slams her hands flat onto the table. “ _No,_ ” she says vehemently. “No, this isn’t what I wanted. Of course it’s not. I just wanted to serve my country, to do my part-”  
Phillips actually snarls. “You _have no part_ , Rogers. You enlisted under false pretenses. You took advantage of a program that, thanks to you, is now dead in the water. You have done nothing but hinder our efforts.”  
She feels tears prickling the backs of her eyes. She opens her mouth, but Phillips’ face darkens and he raises one finger.  
“You are the only remnant of Project Rebirth. You, Rogers. You are the only Super Soldier. We wanted to create hundreds. We wanted to create an army that would destroy Hitler. And now…” His mouth twists with disgust. “Now we have you.”  
She blinks hard, looks at the ceiling. “The vials?” she asks.  
“All the serum we had.”  
“It can’t be recreated?”  
“Oh, sure, it could, and it will, but not in time to win this war. Gonna be a much longer process now that the man who invented it was just shot to death.”  
Stevie flinches.  
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thready. “You have to know this wasn’t my intent. You - I never wanted any of this. Erskine thought I would be the right person for it and I should have said no but I - I just wanted to help.” She wipes a hand down her face and takes a deep, ragged breath.  
  
Phillips curls his lip. “Oh, you’re going to, Rogers. I won’t let this project die because of you.” She looks at him sharply, almost daring to hope, and then she sees the smirk.  
“You’re going to stay. You’re going to stay and let us test you and study you and take your blood and do whatever else we need to do with you to salvage this disaster. You’re going to tell no one - absolutely no one - that you are a female. You’re going to live and breathe under the care of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the United States Army as Steve Rogers, the only remaining subject of Project Rebirth, and in the meantime…”  
He smiles widely, cruelly. “In the meantime, you’re going to be the face of the war effort here at home. No fighting. Safe from any danger that could end your life before we can reconstruct the serum.”

He shoves his chair back and stands, one hand resting on the table. “Or,” he says, as if this has just occurred to him, “we can court-martial you. Enlisting under false pretenses, to start - that’ll be a few years - and I’m betting I can make a fairly convincing argument that you let that Kraut bastard get away on purpose. Treason doesn’t go over well, you know. But really it’s up to you. I can still get your blood if you’re in prison.”

Stevie gapes at him. “I - Sir -” she stammers, her breath hitching. “Please, I - please don’t. Please don’t. I’ll stay.” A sob escapes her and she drops her eyes to the table, hating herself, feeling the shame rise and rise. She weaves her fingers together and squeezes, her bones grinding together like the bones of the man who killed Dr. Erskine. She takes a deep breath and looks back at Phillips.

“I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”  
  
  
\--  
  
\--  
  
“Captain… America,” she says, with more than a touch of skepticism. The blonde girl smiles brightly. “The star-spangled man with a plan!” she singsongs, doing a little flourish with her hands. “What do you think?”  
Stevie looks at herself in the mirror. The mask with the tiny wings is silly, but she has to admit, it’s a lot harder to tell she’s a girl with half her face covered. And the plated suit - some kind of sculpted undercarriage overlaid with fabric - suggests bulging pectoral muscles and broad shoulders. She rolls her arms, testing the flexion of the suit. It’s constricting, but she doesn’t need to fight in it, she thinks with a pang. The blonde girl holds out a small metal shield and Stevie takes it, feels that the painted stars-and-stripes on the front are still tacky.  
  
“Captain America,” she says again. The girl’s smile does not waver as she says, “Mr. Stark is very good at branding.”  
Stevie has to laugh.  
“They’ll love you,” the blonde chirps. “Now, look - your script is taped to the back here, so don’t worry about forgetting your lines - the important thing is just to hit your mark by the time Hitler gets behind Sarabeth, okay? And make sure you stay downstage when you’re doing the pitch or the kick line will hit you in the back. And smile,” she hisses through her own bared teeth. “Phillips is gonna have my ass if you mess this up. Now go!” She shoves Stevie through the curtain as the music swells.  
  
The lights blind her immediately, which helps a bit. She clears her throat.  
“I’m… Captain America,” she says, trying not to grimace. “And I’m here to talk to you today about -” she ducks a glance at the shield- “the role that the common citizen can play in the war effort.”

\--

“The common citizen,” she grumbles at him as she takes the mask off. “Really. That was the term you thought would inspire them. Every time I say it I feel like I’m insulting them.”  
Howard Stark shrugs. “Listen, doll, they don’t care what you call ‘em once they see you lift that motorbike.”  
She widens her eyes at him and he groans. “There’s no one back here. Besides, I call everyone doll. _Besides_ besides, it’s the purloined letter. The more I refer to your womanly physique, the more people think it’s a joke. You’re hiding in plain sight.”  
Stevie sighs. “I can’t believe this is what Phillips wants.”  
They start walking back toward the tent, which is in actuality something more than a tent but less than an actual building. It’s collapsible, but it has walls and rooms and a lab. Stark is very proud of the thing. They’re going to take it on the tour, he says.  
He shrugs again, chews on his lower lip. “He wants what the higher-ups want. And what they want is money.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together.  
“The kids love you. The wives love you. Everyone wants to get a picture with Captain America. Everyone wants to buy war bonds from Captain America. You’re a goddamn superstar. And then there’s me back here futzing around with your superstar blood, trying to untangle that damn Erskine’s trail. You know half his notes are in code? And the other half - woof - the other half are just one-word, two-word snips. ‘Not ideal’, something I read today. What kind of a test result is that? I ask you. What’s a guy supposed to do with that? ‘Not ideal’. Goddamn. Listen, I’m gonna go look at these slides one more time. Get some rest. We got a big travel day tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll need any more of your blood just yet but I have some testing ideas. Go to sleep, Rogers. Get out of my hair. Go. Go.”  
He waves her away and ducks under the doorflap of the lab, muttering to himself. She’s gotten to know Howard pretty well over the last month, albeit in the context of being his personal guinea pig, but she’s already used to these abrupt dismissals. Half the time when Stark talks it’s to himself, and in that state he takes anyone’s presence - even their calm, silent presence - as a deliberate attack on his thought processes.  
She ducks under her own doorflap and kicks off the floppy red boots. She peels off the suit, drops it in a heap on the floor, and collapses onto her cot with a grateful sigh.  
_Captain America_ , she thinks, her mouth twisting into a bitter smile. _What a name for a salesman_.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The USO tour train. Badass ladies bonding. Howard Stark trying desperately to understand what they've made Stevie into.

The American leg of the USO tour goes well, all things considered. 

They travel by train, Stark’s personal cars rattling behind the freight cars filled with supplies, pamphlets, scrap metal. The cars are, Stevie thinks, impossibly big on the inside, each compartment easily as big as any place she’s ever lived. Stark insisted that she be given a private room, which she allowed, but she thwarted him by taking the room next to the boiler - essentially a glorified closet - to give the rest of the crew more space. Now she spends her nights awake and sweating, face pressed to the thin sliver of open window as she tries to suck in cooler air. She wakes - when she manages to sleep - as early as she can, slipping out of the room as soon as she hears signs of life from the rest of the train. She’s careful not to let the crew see her when she’s not in uniform. Stark tells her that no one notices (“and frankly, doll, no one here _cares_ ”), but the less people she pulls into this with her, the better.

She and the sun rise together, and she steps out onto the tiny balcony at the end of the last car to drink coffee out of a tin mug. Peggy comes out to join her and they stand there watching the world go by at a sedate, steady pace as the steam from their cups trails away from them. 

“How are you doing?” Peggy asks her on one of these mornings, somewhere in Oklahoma. The light is gold, the sun slanting directly across them from the east.  
Stevie pulls one shoulder up toward her ear, lets it drop. “As well as I can be, I guess.”  
Peggy laughs, a sad, wistful sound. “I see.”  
“It’s just…” Stevie sighs, blows on her coffee. “It’s not what I envisioned, you know.”  
Peggy nods, her mouth turning down at the corners. “Yes, I imagine it’s not.” Her voice is chilly.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Stevie says into the lengthening silence. They have danced around this for far too long.

The train rattles on the tracks. Stevie sees a hawk circling in the distance.

“I am too,” Peggy finally replies. She pours the dregs of her coffee out, but she doesn’t move to go back inside. She cradles the cup loosely in both hands, looking pensively at the dented tin.  
  
Stevie closes her eyes.  
“I was so scared, Peggy,” she says, and she knows even as she says it that it’s not enough.  
Peggy snorts, or rather, she makes a sound that would be a snort if she weren’t so well-mannered. “Oh, I’m sure. Being a woman in the armed forces sounds just terrifying. I can’t begin to fathom.”  
“Now hold on,” Stevie says hotly. “That isn’t fair. Things are different in-”  
“Oh?” Peggy retorts. “Are they? Is that why I had to come here, to get bloody disrespected all the time? _Too_ much admiration back in England?”  
“You didn’t want to _fight!”_ Stevie yelps, and the smallest sob escapes her. She turns away, looks out across the flat land and tightens her hand around the little railing. “Espionage is - it’s a whole different - it takes _skill_. And you have that.” She lets go of the metal, rubs her fingers over the dents she’s made. “I didn’t. I still don’t. All I can do is fight and anyone can do that. But they still won’t even-”  
She makes a strangled sound as grief and frustration climb up her throat. “They won’t even let me.”

She wipes a hand down her face, rakes her hair back.  
“I know it’s not the same, and I don’t - I can’t even imagine what it must have been like, everyone knowing you’re a woman. What it’s _still_ like. Hodge, Phillips-”  
She shakes her head.  
“I know it’s not the same. And I should have told you. But I was scared, so scared that you’d send me home or - or even if you didn’t, that Phillips would, and he _would_ have, you know he would have, and I just - I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you.”  
She stares into her coffee, which has gone cold. “Which is funny, I guess, because until I really met you I thought I wanted to leave.”

Peggy’s voice is flinty. “What do you mean?”

Stevie feels as if something is squeezing her skull. She closes her eyes, tries not to crush the cup in her hands.  
“That day in the barracks. You told me you thought I was meant for something more.”  
She exhales long and slow.  
  
“I was crying, you know. When you came in. You probably saw. I was - I was thinking about leaving.”  
She sneaks a glance at Peggy, who has not moved. She feels a single tear track down her cheek.  
“And then you came in and you told me you believed in me and that I shouldn’t let anything stop me and I - I should have told you then but it was just - I was -”  
“Rogers,” says Peggy softly. She puts her hand on Stevie’s wrist. “It’s all right.”  
“It’s not an excuse,” she says miserably. “I should have told you. Of all people, I should have at least told you.”  
“You should have,” Peggy answers. “You should have trusted me.”  
She squeezes Stevie’s wrist. “And now you know better.”  
  
She looks Stevie in the eyes then, her face urgent and serious.  
“I do believe you’re meant for great things, Rogers. I’m not giving up on you. But if you lie to me again I will shoot you myself.”  
  
Stevie laughs, startled. “Howard won’t be pleased. He needs me.”  
  
Peggy isn’t ready to smile yet, but her eyebrow arches ever so slightly as she says, “Oh, I wouldn’t _kill_ you.”

She checks her watch. “Speaking of Howard, aren’t you late?”  
Stevie swears, drops her coffee, and bolts into the train.  
  
Peggy stops the cup with her foot, picks it up, and looks at the faint fingermarks pressed into the metal.  
The corner of her mouth lifts just a little.

Stevie skids into the lab, starts strapping on various electrodes and devices whose names she doesn’t know, mumbling _sorry Howard sorry Howard sorry Howard_ as she does. Stark is in the corner, peering at a vial through an enormous pair of goggles. He clicks different lenses in and out of the frames, muttering to himself.  
  
“Treadmill,” he barks, grasping the vial carefully with what looks like a large pair of tweezers. “Start at fifteen.”

She climbs onto the machine, clicks the dial up to fifteen miles an hour. An easy run, and she settles into the pace without a hitch. She watches as Stark does something to the vial that makes it seethe and bubble furiously before lowering it into a vat of dry ice. Then he throws the tweezers into a basin, takes off the goggles, and removes his lab coat.

“Suspenders at work,” she says, her voice even. “At work on a train, no less. You know, you can wear something comfortable. I certainly won’t mind.”  
  
“Rogers, I’m at work on a train full of beautiful women, present company excluded. Forgive me for making an effort.”

She laughs. “Fair enough. It can’t hurt.”  
  
She can almost see his ears perk up. “Why? Did you hear something? It’s Eileen, isn’t it? She’s crazy about me, I can tell. Always asking me where her helmet is.”

Stevie rolls her eyes, doesn’t break her stride. “I’ll keep an ear out,” she says drily. “That can be the next publicity stunt. ‘Captain America attends train wedding’. What a photo opportunity.”  
  
Stark sighs in mostly-feigned disgust. “You are the only person I’ve ever met who would complain about being adored. You have comic books, you know that? You do know that, right? You have a little, what do you call it. Action man. You squeeze him and his muscles flex. Crank it up to 25, please.”

She turns the little wheel, puts on some speed.  
“I’m just saying,” he continues. “You could do worse.”  
She huffs a laugh, now slightly out of breath. “Yeah. The costume could be really stupid and uncomfortable.”  
“You could be in a military prison.”  
“I could actually be fighting in the war, like I wanted.”  
He doesn’t respond to that.

She runs in silence while he looks at the printouts, her vitals scrolling endlessly across the paper, spilling down onto the floor. “Up to 30,” he says now. She’s beginning to feel her heartbeat in her ears. She’s been running for maybe twenty minutes straight.

“You know, your vitals go crazy when you get mad,” he remarks, trying to disentangle himself from the streams of paper.  
  
“I’m not mad,” she says on an exhale.  
“Mmm, you are according to these.” He taps one of the machines.  
  
“I’m frustrated,” she takes a deep breath, “not mad,” breathes out, “because I feel like,” another breath, “a trained monkey.” Breathes out. “I should be,” almost a gasp, “out there,” lungs burning, “doing my part.” Pant, pant.  
“You are doing your part. Your part’s just in here. Now up to 32.”  
She groans, turns the dial. She runs for another half-hour in silence, punctuated only by the scraping of her breath in and out of her body. She makes it up to 42 miles an hour before Stark tells her to shut the machine down.

Next they do mental tests - logic, math, language. Spatial awareness, memory, fine and gross motor skills. He gives her a physical - the awkwardness of which has long since given way to a weary resignation on both their parts - and screens her for disease, signs of aging, loss of muscle tone, anything that would indicate a breakdown in the serum that courses through her veins.

“So if I bleed out,” she asks him, “what-”

“Ssssh,” he hisses, pressing the stethoscope against her back. “How many times have we done this? No talking.”  
She waits impatiently for him to take the little earpieces out. “If I bleed out - if I lost too much of my blood, would the serum not work anymore? Would it be gone?”

He looks at her exasperatedly.  
“ _What?_ What is _wrong_ with you? Why would you ask me that? ‘If I bleed out’. What? Why are you losing that much blood? What is this scenario?”

She holds out her arm for the blood pressure cuff.  
“Humor me. Pretend you got tired of all the questions one day and you stabbed me. If I live, am I still a supersoldier? Or do I revert?”  
He squeezes the cuff tighter than she feels is necessary. 

“The serum still exists inside my body, right?” she presses. “That’s why we’re doing this. So that means I could lose it.”

He shakes his head. “We still don’t understand exactly how it works, Rogers. It’s in there, but it’s - it’s bound up with everything else, all your molecules and whatnot. It’s part of you. Your body is - it’s not exactly _producing_ the serum now, but it seems to be replicating it somehow. It’s like a perpetual-motion machine. The serum started the process but now it’s constantly happening, all your cells are just… always becoming… super. At least that’s what it looks like so far. So.”

He unstraps the cuff, swabs the crook of her elbow with alcohol.  
“As far as I can tell, to answer your question, if you lived you’d still be…” He waves his hands. “This. I don’t know what it’d take to kill you, besides a bullet in the brain, but almost anything short of that is gonna be more of a tickle than anything else.”  
He looks thoughtful as he jabs a needle-tipped tube into her arm. 

“I wonder, though. From what I can see you heal quicker than the average bear, but I’d need more precise numbers to pin down exactly what the rate factor is.”  
She watches her blood well into the first vial. He unsnaps it, clips in another one. A drop of blood falls onto the floor. 

“I wonder,” he says again. 

He pulls the needle free, presses a gauze pad into the hollow of her elbow with his thumb. His hand is warm on her skin and his face is cloudy, pensive. She presses her own hand over the gauze and he removes his, scoops up the vials, puts them into a small box. He puts the bloody needle into a separate container.

Stark has the grace to look sorry as he says, “I think I’d like to break your arm.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More tests, and some more body horror.

He puts her under for it, at least.

She smirks as he unspools the tube, bringing the mask toward her.  
“Too bad this wasn’t an option for the procedure itself, huh?”

He sighs. “Look, doll, I don’t like this any more than you do, but there’s no other way to figure out what exactly we did to you, you know? If we know how it affected you, it’ll put us closer to being able to reconstruct it.”

She notices he doesn’t apologize.

“Just - if I’m right, you should be back in action after about a week, okay? And it won’t be a bad break, and it’ll just be your forearm.”

He straps the mask onto her face. “Wink if you’re okay with what’s happening.”  
She holds his gaze, widening her eyes as much as she can.

He sighs again, turns the valve on the steel cylinder next to him. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and as Howard’s face gets fuzzy she thinks, _Buffy wouldn’t let them do this to her._

She dreams, a quicksilver stream of fragmented images. Light on water and Buffy’s hair in the sunlight and a small wood-floored room strewn with charcoal drawings.  
For the first time since she got the serum, she dreams about the machine. 

She wakes abruptly, with a splinted arm and a searing headache. She is strapped to the table.

“Ugh,” she says. “My head feels like it’s filled with rocks. Sharp ones.” She jerks the restraint on her right arm. “What is this?”

Howard, who is scribbling on a notepad, looks up at her and nods. 

“It turns out you metabolize toxins _real_ quick, Rogers. You kept tryin’ to come out of it. I had to give you almost the whole tank. Thought I was gonna put you in a coma.”

She huffs the barest hint of a laugh. “Thanks for thinking of me, I guess.”

“Oh, no,” he says. “No, that was for my benefit. You were very interested in, uh, finding the source of the injury.”

He rubs at his throat distractedly. 

“So. With normal humans we’re looking at between six and eight weeks, right? Average woman-” he looks at Stevie, clicks his tongue- “we’ll say slightly below-average, if pre-serum was your baseline-”  
“Hey!”  
“-probably closer to eight. So we’ll say that’s our comparison point.”

“Phillips will kill you if I’m out for eight weeks. We have shows almost every other day.”

“Well, you’ll have to do them without bending your elbow. Good thing you punch Hitler with your right hand.”

She raises her left arm experimentally. It is splinted with her elbow at a ninety-degree angle, a sad broken bird’s wing, but there is no pain. She feels only a slight resistance as she slowly rotates it outward. 

“Besides, it’s not gonna be eight weeks, if my hunch is right. I’m wagering closer to one.”

She sighs. “Well, thanks, I guess. I’d like to go to my room now.”

“Sure, sure,” he says distractedly, staring at a printout. “Is your headache gone?”

“Yes,” she grumbles as she slides off the table. “Unless you mean the one standing in front of me.”

“Ah, there she is. Scrappy Rogers. See, you’re fine. Listen, how do your lungs feel? I have some ideas about-”  
“Stark. I’m leaving now. We can talk about this tomorrow.”  
“Sure, yeah. Only I’m just curious because-”  
“Goodbye, Howard.”

She doesn’t slam the door, but she thinks about it.

She lies on the tiny bunk faceup, her broken arm cradled against her chest. The train rumbles all around her and the vibration is soothing. The oppressive heat coming from the boiler room makes her drowsy. She holds her arm up, looks at it in the light coming through the window. It really doesn’t hurt, which amazes her. _Maybe I’m still anesthetized,_ she thinks, and lowers it back against her. She turns her head on the pillow and looks out the window, at the flat land rolling by. Her eyes close.

The machine is cold on the inside. The needles bristle inside her skin, barbed and vicious. She struggles and they bite deeper, poison fangs scraping at her bones. She rolls her head back and forth, looking for a way out, looking for someone - it is so dark inside the machine - the light is coming back and this time it will kill her - she screams and screams but nothing happens, she can see the light creeping in under the edges of the door and she thrashes, the needles ripping jagged holes in her flesh, but they are in too deep and she cannot escape, she feels blood pouring down her arms and legs, dripping from her twitching fingers, the light glares in through the window and she is still screaming and the light pours into her mouth, down her throat into her lungs her bones her blood is still pattering onto the floor below her and she is dead, she knows she is dead, she died in this machine and they scraped her body out onto the street with the trash and this life in the train this life on the stage this life without Buffy has all been a dream and now, and now, she is dead and she is free and the light shreds her into pieces and now. And now.

She wakes abruptly, still flat on her back, arm still pressed to her chest. There are tears on her cheeks.

 _Shit,_ she thinks as she stares at the ceiling.

She rolls off the bunk.

_Buff-_

_I don’t know where they’ve got you stationed, but I hope it’s warm. I hope no news is good news, if you catch my drift (write me, Barnes!)._  
_You’re really not going to believe what’s happened since you left. The short version is that I’m in the army now, sort of, and we’re coming overseas soon._  
_I asked Stark if he knew anything about your unit, where you are, but he gave a typical Stark non-answer and then started grumbling about how he’s been here with us, so how could he possibly know anything, and anyway didn’t I trust you to take care of yourself, and on, and on._  
_I know you can take care of yourself, Buffy - you took care of me, too. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry._  
_If we make it to wherever you’re at, try not to laugh when you see me, all right? The whole thing was very much_ not _my idea._  
_I miss you._

She pushes away from the tiny desk, her throat aching. She looks at the letter and sobs once, hard, before she crumples it into a ball. She can’t send this. She has no idea where Buffy is and even if she did, it’s hard enough to get a letter sent to a civilian these days, let alone another member of the army, let alone a member of a top-secret codebreaking division. Not to mention the fact that she herself is being kept under lock and key, and there’s no way Phillips would let her send a letter to anyone, especially one that gives even vague details of her movements. 

She is alone, and unless the USO tour happens to take them wherever Buffy’s stationed, she has to stay that way. 

She stands there in the little room, her hand on the back of the chair, looking out the window. She thinks for a moment about the tiny apartment back home, which has surely been rented. Is the new tenant getting letters addressed to one Stevie Rogers, sent courtesy of the U.S. Army? 

_I didn’t leave a forwarding address,_ she thinks, and a hysterical giggle bubbles out of her. _Where would they even send the letter? Captain America, The Train in the Middle of the Country, USA. She probably thinks they finally arrested me.  
Or that I’m dead._

The giggle dies in her throat, dissolves into hot, stinging tears, and Stevie doesn’t fight them. She curls onto the bed and cries, pressing the pillow to her face with her good hand, her body shuddering with the force of it, until finally, dreamlessly, she sleeps.

\--

The arm takes a week to heal. Stark is delighted, claims he’s that much closer to pinning down some kind of formula for the accelerated rate. 

He starts using himself as a control - a nick here, a bruise there. They have matching black eyes for about a day before Stevie’s heals, the purple lingering on his face for another week. “Obviously this is all approximate,” he says as he examines a recently healed cut, “but it’s the best we can do right now, and it’s helping.”

Stevie just watches him, silent and impassive. It doesn’t matter. She’s learning about her body, her limits, what she can do, and it’s useful - she knows this - but she can’t bring herself to care when she’ll never get to do anything real with it.

The next phase of testing lasts through all of California. 

“Toxins,” Stark declares, unveiling a case full of syringes. “To test your immune system.”

She just holds out her arm, stares at the wall. She draws on the backs of old printouts, discarded file folders. She dreams of the machine almost every night now.

They run through the infectious diseases first. The closest she ever comes to actually contracting an illness is the day he gives her the flu - she has the shivers for a few hours before she falls asleep and wakes up perfectly healthy. 

The poisons are harder on her, but none of them kill her, even in above-lethal doses. She doesn’t miss a single show.

She goes to her room and the lab, her room and the lab and the stage, sleeps and wakes and sleeps and dreams and wakes and goes to the lab and tries not to think about anything.

The first time she speaks to Stark in over a month is when he says _mustard gas._ It pulls her up out of herself like a hook, reeling her up out of dark deep water. She surfaces into the light squinting, confused, and she looks at him dully and says, “What?”

“ _Finally,_ ” he says, exasperated. “Where have you been?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t realize you wanted to bond with your lab rat.”

Stark sounds genuinely hurt. “Rogers, I - you know that’s not how I want this to be. I don’t - I don’t _enjoy_ this.”

Stevie just looks at him.

“This is important work, Rogers. And I wish it didn’t have to be done at your expense, but you’re what we’ve got. We have to reconstruct the serum before HYDRA does, or-”

“HYDRA? How could HYDRA reconstruct it? How would they even _have_ it? You said - Phillips said I’m the only one. In the world.”

Stark wipes a hand down his face, lets out a long breath. “You’re the only success.”

Dr. Erskine’s face flashes into her mind.

She leans forward, rips off the leads attached to her temples. “Explain. Now.”

Stark shuts his eyes. 

Then he tells her.

“I don’t know much, and what I do know I heard from Peggy. Do you know how Erskine got here?”

Stevie shakes her head mutely.

“He had a subject before you. Back in Germany. Well - ‘subject’ isn’t the right word, but - you know. He was supposed to capture Erskine, take him to Hitler so that they could give the serum to the Nazis. But this guy, this officer, he was HYDRA, and he didn’t - he didn’t care about Hitler as much as he cared about his own power. He caught Erskine, but then he sent his family to Dachau, forced him to give up the serum. Erskine told him it wasn’t ready, told him he wasn’t a good candidate, but-”

He spreads his hands.

“He used it on himself. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t think anyone does, aside from Erskine. But it was bad enough that this guy - Schmidt - he locked Erskine up. He was gonna hold him there, torture him until he fixed the serum, I guess, but Peggy rescued him on an SOE mission.”

Stark looks at the floor. 

“So. They have… a version of the serum. It’s not the version you got, but it’s close enough, and it doesn’t sound like Schmidt has any qualms about injecting himself with whatever’s on hand. It’s only a matter of time before they figure out how to make it, and they’ve probably got more than one scientist working on it.”

He looks small and lost, and Stevie remembers with a pang that he’s only a year older than she is. She feels something crumble inside of her, and she slips off the table to stand next to him. “Howard,” she says softly. He raises his head to look at her, and she puts a hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

He leans in then, puts his head on her shoulder, and pulls her into a hug. “Me too,” he says, voice muffled by her shirt. They stand there for awhile, arms around each other, until finally he pulls back, discreetly wiping away tears. 

“Rogers - if I could be my own guinea pig, I would. You gotta know that.”

“I know, Howard. I do.” She smiles wryly. “And you’ve managed to suffer for the cause anyway.”

He laughs, his voice still thick with emotion, and scratches at one of the bandages on his arm. “Yeah, well. It’s the least I could do.”

He looks at her. “I think we’re done for today, doll. Let’s go down to the dining car and see what they’ve got that doesn’t come in a can.”

Something small and warm unfurls inside her chest, and she smiles. 

“I hope you’re not getting your hopes up.”

“A man can dream, Captain. Can I call you Captain?”

“Don’t push it.”

They walk in companionable silence to the dining car, where they find one of the dancers drinking a cup of coffee.

“Hey, Sal,” says Stevie, nodding at her. Sally gives her a perfunctory smile and goes back to her newspaper. Stevie can’t be too friendly with any of the dancers - can’t get too close, lest they guess her secret - but it still hurts that they’ve spent all these months together and never moved beyond casual hellos. 

“Sally,” Stark purrs, his voice fully half an octave lower than normal, and Stevie fights off a grin.

Sally raises her eyebrow, but the corner of her mouth twitches. “Mr. Stark.”

Stevie can feel him about to launch into a _call me Howard_ song and dance, but Sally puts the newspaper on the table and looks at them directly. “So you’ve heard?”

They look at each other, then back to her.

“We’re shipping out,” she says, pleased to know something that they don’t. “As soon as we hit the station tomorrow, they’re loading us into a plane and then it’s off to Italy.”

She stands, tipping the last of her coffee into her mouth, and smirks. “Finally get to perform for some real soldiers.” She sets the cup down gently, carefully, and sweeps out of the room.

Stark rolls his eyes heavenward. “These girls, Rogers. I swear. Just be glad you’ll never have to marry one.”

He claps her on the shoulder. “Coffee?”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stevie's first time in a plane. Howard and Peggy's millionth time in a plane. The first (and last) Captain America show in Italy, and for the rest of the war.

Stevie is pleased to find out that the serum has also cured her motion sickness. Less thrilling is the realization that sleeping out of boredom is now pretty much impossible. She spends the flight to Italy drawing and wishing for a window. Stark sits next to her, checking her pulse every so often after they get to cruising altitude. Peggy drowses, strapped into the seat across from them.

“You know, I can fly a plane,” Stark remarks, taking a drink from a flask he’s pulled out of his vest pocket.

“Mm,” Stevie agrees, not really listening.

He elbows her gently. “Am I boring you?”

She puts down the charcoal. “‘Boring’ makes it sound so passive.”

He snorts a laugh and leans over. “What are you drawing?”

She tilts the sketchpad so he can see: curving lips, cloud of dark hair, fierce, delighted eyes.

“Ah, Barnes,” he says, nodding thoughtfully. “Good gal. Very smart.”

He looks at her sidelong. “You miss her.”

Stevie sighs. “Yeah, I do. She’s my best friend, you know? We grew up together.”

He nods again. “She told me. Said you got her into a lot of trouble.”

“Did she, now. Did she tell you she was usually about one step behind me, egging me on?”

“The way she tells it, she was a step behind you mopping up all the blood.”

Stevie raises her eyebrows and grins. “Six of one, half-dozen of the other.”

Peggy kicks her in the ankle without opening her eyes.

“Children,” she murmurs. “Mummy is trying to sleep.”

Stark chuckles. “Sorry, Peg.”

Peggy makes a quiet rumbling sound in her chest and sinks lower in her seat.

Stark drops his voice into a loud whisper. “That’s why we have to strap her in. She’ll slide all the way onto the floor.”

She kicks him in the ankle this time.

 

Stark begs some paper off of her and spends the rest of the trip drawing a catastrophically bad flipbook, which he presents to her before they disembark.

“Captain America Goes to Italy,” she reads. She lets the pages flick past her thumb, watches a tiny stick version of herself cartwheel through Nazi lines. “Is this you in the mask behind me?”

“Nah, it’s Barnes,” he says, swinging his bag onto his back. “I’m not dumb enough to get behind enemy lines, but she strikes me as a girl who’s into danger.” He grins roguishly, waggles his eyebrows at her.

“Danger, yes. Salesmen, no.”

He claps a hand to his heart. “Madam, I am a _scientist_ -”

“She did like your flying car, though.”

He groans. “Shit. That’s it for me, then. No dame wants a man who can’t keep his car in the air.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons why she wouldn’t be interested.”

He’s about to say something very snide, she’s sure, but just then an ear-piercing whistle splits the air.

“All _right_ ,” shouts Peggy from somewhere in the middle of the plane. “Ladies, let’s form a _line_. Don’t you want to get _off_ the plane? Everyone takes their own bags, Lila - I see you - don’t let Lila carry your bag, Caroline, you’re perfectly capable - a _line_ , ladies, a _line_ , come on, _today_ -”

Her voice fades into the din as Stevie shuffles her way off the plane into pouring rain.

“I thought it was supposed to be _sunny_ ,” wails one of the dancers as she darts past, shielding herself with her bag.

They pile into the transports, the smell of wet hairspray and fifteen hours on a plane heavy in the air. Stevie closes her eyes and tips her head back against the wall of the carrier, listens to the rain drumming on the metal roof.

When she opens her eyes again it is nighttime, and they have arrived at camp. The dancers are shuttled into a massive tent, Stevie trailing along behind them. She falls onto her bunk still fully dressed and sleeps, finally, like the dead.

* * *

Stark is there the next day when she steps off the stage, utterly defeated.

“They hate me, Howard,” she says despondently. “And I don’t blame them. _Captain America_ ,” she says bitterly. “I just wish they knew - how much I’d rather be out there with them, you know? Instead of…” She shakes the tomato slime off her shield and sighs. “Do you think we can get the girls to come back? I know most of them have the outfits off by now, but-”

She looks at him then and stops, stilled by the look on his face.

“Howard, what is it?”

His mouth twists, and he darts a look over his shoulder. “Phillips made me promise I wouldn’t tell you until after the show, but-”

“Howard, stop. Tell me.”

He looks miserable.

“It’s Barnes.”

* * *

She storms into the officers’ tent, shaking with rage. Stark hovers behind her. She looks at the wall behind Phillips and her vision actually greys out for a moment with the surge of anger and horror that she feels.

There is a tiny red pin on the map behind the border of Nazi flags.

She looks at that dot and her hands snap into fists. She’s breathing so hard she’s almost gasping. Her blood pounds in her head, behind her eyes, and somehow she forms the words:

“Was Buffy Barnes among the captured soldiers?”

Phillips looks up nonchalantly, as if he hasn’t noticed them come in. As if he hasn’t been glaring daggers at Howard for a full thirty seconds.

“Bu - Elizabeth Barnes,” she says, hoarse with fear and pain. “Was she?”

He leans back in his chair, puts down the pen he’s holding.

“You know where they are. Is there going to be a rescue mission?”

“Rogers, you are addressing a superior officer, and you will do so with the respect accorded to my station.”

“I will do no such thing,” she says, her voice low and full of fury. “Not for a man that abandons his soldiers.”

Phillips sighs, his face unreadable.  

“Look, _I’ll_ go, if you’re too afraid-”

“You are not a soldier, Rogers. You are an experiment. I don’t expect you to understand what makes rescuing these men impossible, but you had damn sure better believe that I expect you not to question me.”

“You let me go out there and prance around when half their men are - You didn’t even tell me who they were. You _knew_ -”

“ _Of course I knew_ ,” he roars, exploding out of his chair, and it sucks the air from her lungs. He walks toward her slowly, measuredly, like a tiger about to pounce, as he continues. “They were _my men_ , Rogers. Did Stark tell you that? Did you think I was here solely to keep you apprised of the situation?”

She can’t speak, can only look at him.

“Let me make something very clear to you, Rogers. You are a chorus girl. I am under no obligation to tell you anything. I am under no obligation to do anything for you. I am only under obligation to keep you alive and selling bonds. You are here and not in prison solely through my good grace, and if you raise your voice to me again that grace will wear thin very, very quickly.”

He stops in front of her, leans in close.

“Do you understand me, _Private_ Rogers?”

She will not cry. She will not cry here, now, in this moment when Buffy needs her, in this moment when Buffy may not even be alive. She blinks hard, takes a deep breath, and looks Phillips in the eye.

“Sir. Yes, sir.” _I will fucking kill you_.

She snaps off a salute and turns on her heel, barely making it two steps before he says, “She was. Barnes. I remember I wrote the letter.”

She stops walking, but she doesn’t turn around. She looks at Howard, begging him to deny it.

Phillips’ voice is softer now. Not kind, but closer to it.

“We had her with us, her and some of the SOE gals. It turns out she’s handy with a sniper rifle.”

The only thing she sees in Howard’s eyes is despair. She shuts her eyes, feeling the world spin around her, and then she straightens her spine and walks out of the tent before the tears start to fall.

Stark catches up to her, touches her arm, and she whirls on him. "You said you could fly a plane."

His eyes are red-rimmed and watery, and when he realizes what she wants they go wide with shock. "Rogers, I-"

"Were you lying?"

"No, God, no, but-"

She's already walking toward the airfield, still wearing the goddamn costume. There's no time.

"Rogers!" 

Peggy is running toward her. A light rain is beginning to fall.

"You can't stop me, Peggy," she says over her shoulder. 

"I'm not," Peggy says as she yanks Stevie to a halt. "I'm coming with you."

* * *

It's cold in the plane, but Howard's face is slick with sweat and pale as death. "Told you I could fly," he says with a weak grin. "We're coming up on enemy airspace now, so just-"

There is an explosion just then, somewhere to their left, and the plane lurches and drops a few hundred feet. Howard swears and then continues to swear, a muttered stream of profanity under his breath as he wrestles the plane through the sky. "This is - fuck - Rogers, this is the best I can do - we have to -"

"I know," Stevie says. Peggy hands her a helmet and a radio, and they look at each other for a long moment. Peggy touches her cheek and says, "Call as soon as you're ready to be picked up. I'll be waiting."

"Thank you. Thank you both," Stevie shouts as the door opens, wind whistling into the plane. She can see Peggy's lips move, form the word  _parachute_ , and she nods. "I have it!" she yells. "I'll be fine!"

Stark groans loudly enough that she can hear him over the engine and yells, " _Go_ , Rogers, god  _damn_ it!"

She pushes herself out of the plane.

She drops like a stone through the ink-black sky, punctured only by occasional flashes of light. The thunder of explosives rumbles around her as she arrows toward the ground. She waits until the last possible moment before she yanks the cord, knowing that if she's too high when the chute opens she'll be seen. As it is, she's only about six hundred feet above the ground when it opens and she lands hard, curling into a ball that leaves a sizable dent in the ground when she climbs to her feet.

She looks up at the stars, gets her bearings. She thinks about the map on Phillips' wall and feels rage bubble up inside her again but she tamps it down, looking west toward the place where she knows the remaining members of the 107th are being held. She can see, faintly, the glow of man-made lights on the horizon. She straps the tiny metal shield onto her arm more tightly, takes a deep breath.  _I can do this. I'm coming, Buffy._

Then she starts running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay SO i am writing chapter notes now, i am being a more engaging and communicative author, and I am sorry that I haven't been thus far! I went back and added chapter summaries to everything, and the note at the beginning of the fic is way longer. I'm gonna repost it here, for those of you who have been kind enough to read every chapter even though I am a weird recluse who doesn't understand how to do these things, and i appreciate that you have stuck around. comments and feedback are welcome! thank you again!  
> also, madeleine taught me where to find the real line breaks, so things are gonna look fancier from here on out :D
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the lyrics of a song that I have loved for years, and the first time I saw CA:TWS I thought about it in the context of Steve/Bucky and I haven't ever really stopped. Those lyrics are posted here below.
> 
> I am new to the whole fic game and I am realizing how communicative most authors are, and that I haven't really been that way so far with this fic, and I'd like to change that. So if you have questions or comments or feedback or you just wanna chat, please drop me a line. I also realized that chapter summaries are not really as optional as I thought they were, so I have gone through and added those to the existing chapters and I will continue to do that going forward. Thank you for bearing with me, sorry this note is now a thousand years long, if you're just getting here and you're starting from the beginning, uh, I've always been great at this and you don't even need to worry about it, don't even give it a second thought. Those of you who have been reading and commenting so far: thank you, you are giving me hope and strength, thank you again.
> 
> MY HEART'S THE SAME
> 
> your heart's breaking in me  
> like I ain't been broke before  
> and it feels good-  
> it feels good  
> it feels good, we should do this more
> 
> I can't see your ears no more  
> I fell in love with you when your hair was still short  
> but now you've gone and matured  
> I think someday you'll cut it  
> someday you'll cut it  
> like we cut it short
> 
> I can still see your face  
> although the years may have forced some change  
> and I know I'm no longer the same  
> and I hope I don't show it  
> I hope I don't show it  
> but my heart's the same
> 
> one by one they come and pass  
> in pairs of two we know we can't last  
> and I hope I don't show it  
> I hope I don't show it  
> but my heart's the same
> 
> promise, promise sweetheart  
> fingers 'round in time  
> fingers 'round each other  
> and all of this in time  
> but the cold ain't so cold  
> when you hold  
> yourself to me


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of a daring rescue, feat. the introduction of a few of the Howling Commandos.

There is just enough room in her mind amid the fear and the rage, the blinding focus, for her to be angry at Phillips for keeping her from this. From what she was made to do. She streaks through the night like a wildcat, her footing sure and swift in the rushing darkness, and she feels whatever is inside of her now humming with pleasure, with a sense of rightness. She can hear animals in the woods around her, the breathing of a sniper who cannot see her, and she’s up the tree with her forearm against his throat before she can even process that she’s heard him. She feels him go limp, squeezes for another few seconds, and then uses his bandolier to strap the body to the branches, out of sight. The longer she conceals her advance the better. She drops out of the tree and lands lightly, on the balls of her feet, and has a momentary twinge of nausea as she thinks, _First kill_.

She keeps running.

She runs through the night, moving ever closer to the glow of the facility. There are two more snipers along the way, and she tries not to think of Buffy as she dispatches them. Around midnight, she estimates, she hears the low rumble of transport trucks. She slows to a trot, then ducks into a particularly thick copse of trees. Pressed against the bark, she closes her eyes and listens. _Two trucks,_ she thinks. _Big. Ten men each, maybe_.

She chances a look out toward the road that she cannot see but knows is there, and in the starlight she sees the hulking shapes of two convoy trucks. She feels another surge of exhilaration - totally inappropriate, she knows, but still she feels it. She bares her teeth in the dark.

It’s easy enough to spring from the tree branch into the back of the truck, which is covered only by a thin piece of camouflaged fabric. She hits the floor shoulder first and rolls to her feet almost silently, crouched and ready. There are only six men in the truck and they are so surprised by the sudden appearance of a human-shaped American flag that she is able to knock four of them out before the rest even stand up. The remaining two she slams together, each of their heads cracking against the other, and they drop like sandbags. She rolls all six of them out of the back of the truck one by one, waiting each time for a bump in the road, something that will explain away the sudden _thump_ from the rear of the vehicle. Then she crouches in the back of the truck, waiting.

An hour later, give or take, the truck rumbles to a stop. Stevie sees light through the crack between the canvas and the bed of the truck, yellow sodium burning hot and steady. She shuffles to the edge of the truck, peeks out. They are parked behind a large metal structure, some kind of silent, hulking creature haloed in light. She can see the facility, whatever it is, looming above it all. She sucks in a breath, shuts her eyes and thinks _courage_ , and then she rolls neatly out of the truck.

She crouches next to the back left tire as she surveys the area. Now that her eyes have adjusted she sees it’s not as bright as she thought, although she’s definitely still quite visible in the old stars-and-stripes. _Gotta remember to thank Phillips for that_. Her eyes find the faint outline of a door in the side of the structure, a thin dark stripe against the impenetrable gray. As she watches, another, smaller truck pulls up to the door and two men get out. They unload something that looks vaguely like a cannon, propping open the door to carry it inside, and every muscle in her body tenses. Before she can second-guess herself she darts out from the shadow of the truck, running in a silent, animal crouch. She slips inside as one of the men reaches to shut the door, clipping him neatly in the jaw with an uppercut that puts him right out. His buddy is right behind him, and she slams her fist into his temple. He goes down. She drags both of them into the shadowy corner next to the door, straightens up, and looks around. She is in a small, dusty room. The floor is vibrating, the entire structure humming around her like she’s standing in a generator. There is a door on the opposite wall. She crosses the room cautiously, quickly, and pushes it open a fraction of an inch, presses her face to the crack. Then she pushes the door all the way open and stands there, stunned, staring.

_It’s a goddamn factory._

It is the size of an airplane hangar. Bigger than that. It is the size of Grand Central Station. Bigger than that. It’s bigger than anything she’s ever seen, any place she’s been in her life that still had a _roof_ on top. She can see the ceiling, faintly, through what seems like miles of crisscrossing branches of metal walkways, like veins in a body. There is a high-pitched whirring sound, and the floor rumbles under her feet. It feels like the building is breathing, like she’s been swallowed alive. She feels terror uncoil in her gut as she looks up into the machine, the conveyor belts that surround it. There are towers and towers, stretching away from her in a line, like telephone poles, like they’re just holding up the ceiling, only there is blue light spilling out of them. There is blue light everywhere, she realizes dully, through the shock and confusion. The air is suffused with a pale blue glow, a cold light that makes her skin crawl. She scans around, looking for something to help her get her bearings, and starts moving east along the wall closest to her. She keeps her eyes focused outward, constantly tracking from side to side, waiting for something to move, something besides the whirring mechanical things that are moving above her, above the conveyor belts. She keeps one hand against the wall, the shield out in front of her, whatever small good it will do, and sidesteps. After about ten minutes of slow, steady pacing her left foot drops out from under her, and she barely catches herself before her face slams into the floor. She has stumbled into a stairwell, a spindly, skeletal thing that winds down and away from her. She crouches down below the floor, cocks her head. She hears faint voices. Shouting. The clanging of metal bars.

She closes her eyes, says a brief prayer, and plunges down the stairs.

The stairs go down forever, it feels like. The temperature drops. The shouts get louder, and Stevie tastes copper in her mouth as she bolts downward, trying desperately not to fall or make a sound. After what feels like an eternity she finally hits solid ground, leveling out away from the stairs into an echoing stone-walled cavern. She stops in her tracks, her footfalls still ringing against the dripping walls. Her breath scrapes in her throat, but it’s not exhaustion - it’s fear. She fights it down and moves toward one of the walls, anxious to have something at her back. She flattens herself against the stone, wills her breathing into a rhythm, counting. She shuts her eyes and listens, and the shouts echoing around the empty cavern finally point her down one of the tunnels that branches away. She moves quietly, catlike, the shield in front of her. Her other hand is clenched into a fist, the bleeding, broken skin on her knuckles knitting back together as she walks. _Gloves next time_ , she thinks absently. She can see light up ahead, spilling out of a roughly cut hole in the stone wall, and she quickens her pace. She presses her back against the wall next to the hole, uses the rough metal of her shield to try and see what’s behind her. The metal is dull and warped but she can see bars. She takes one more deep breath and slips around the corner into the room.

The uproar is immediate.

All of the soldiers start yelling, most of them in English, but there are so many of them and they are so loud and frantic that their words fall on her ears without meaning. She looks at the men closest to her, walks toward the bars that separate them from her.

“What the fuck is this? Is that a bloody _flag_ shield?” cries one of them in an English accent. “Just sent the bloody posterboy, did they? No need for a full complement? Ah, that’s great, innit. Just great. Who the fuck are you supposed to be?”

A smaller, wiry soldier shoves that one, gets in his face, and she blocks them both out as she looks around.

The room is far bigger than she had thought, and it is packed with soldiers. There are more than ten different cages - actual cages, not even cells, they are packed into cages like animals - and each one holds at least thirty men. They are haggard, emaciated, and Stevie feels a bright, hot flare of hatred for Colonel Phillips. She swings the tiny shield in a hard downward arc, slices the padlock on the first cage clean off.

The Brit and the smaller soldier fall silent.

“I’m Captain America,” she says heavily. “Can all of you walk?”

Another man in the cage elbows the Brit, says something in French, and shoves past her out of the cage.

“Wait, wait,” yells another soldier. “What’s the plan here?” This one is wearing a bowler hat. Stevie suppresses a wild, fleeting urge to laugh.

“The plan is to get the hell out of here,” she snaps, making her way toward the other cages. “There’s a forest not two klicks north of here. Unless they’ve put more snipers out there since I landed, it’s safe. And something tells me they’re going to be too distracted to do that before long.”

She looks at the man in the hat. “Do you know where we are? How to get out of here?”

The man laughs. “‘Course I do. Who do you think runs the machines, builds the goddamn guns? I could walk this place blindfolded.”

She stops for a moment. “This is an arms factory?”

“Yeah,” he says, loping along beside her as she smashes the locks off each cage. “Schmidt’s insane. They’ll never even need half this stuff. Millions of guns. They have a tank bigger than a Panzer. Everything powered with this blue stuff.”

She tries to parse this but she can’t, there’s no time, and she turns to the man and says, “What’s your name?”

“Dugan,” he says, putting his hand out. “Dum Dum Dugan.”

She shakes his hand, feeling again the sudden urge to giggle. “Steve Rogers.”

He stops midshake, tightens his grip on her. “Rogers?” he says urgently. “Steve Rogers? You know Barnes?”

Her blood turns to ice in her veins.

“Yes. Yes, I do. Is she- is-” She can’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“They took her the second day we were here,” he says. “Her and a few others, I don’t know why. We haven’t seen them since. Short little bald man, big lips. Glasses. Always writing things down.”

She thinks suddenly of Erskine, her mind reeling, scrabbling for an association. A scientist?

He pulls her in closer, his mustache almost touching her face. “I’ll get them out of here. You said two klicks north?”

Stevie nods. “I’ll find Buffy. Take everything you can.”

Dugan smiles viciously. “Oh, don’t worry, Captain. We will.”

He releases her, shoving her back toward the tunnel. As he jogs toward the rest of the cages, he yells, “Alright, men! Who wants to find out how these goddamn guns _work?_ ”

The resulting roar of gleeful rage carries her out of the room.

She pelts back toward the stairs, trying desperately to think. Where would a lab be? Why would there be a lab in a weapons facility?

A siren starts to bray overhead, and Stevie almost drops to the ground at the sheer volume of it. She looks up as she runs, spots the glint of camera lenses and groans to herself. _Great, Rogers_. _Fantastic. Very stealthy._ All she can do is hope that she makes a more enticing target than the ragged men currently following Dum Dum Dugan up a different set of stairs to the factory floor.

She charges up the rickety staircase she came down, the metal shrieking in protest as she slams against it. She emerges onto the main floor of the facility breathing hard, shaking with _(fear)_ adrenaline, and looks around wildly. Lab. Lab. The siren is so much louder on this floor, jangling her thoughts out of line. Lab. She starts to run, hugging the wall, crossing the vast expanse of the facility. Lab. Where would -

In the distance, a small rectangle, carved in thin lines of light.

She breaks into a sprint.

The door is locked. She yowls in frustration, slams her shoulder against it. “Buffy!” she yells. “Buffy, are you in there?!” She hears a low murmur - a voice? Something? She can’t tell, and she slams into the door again. “Buff!”

This time she definitely hears a voice, words - _three, eight_. Silence. The siren changes pitch, stuttering up into a louder, higher wail, and somewhere a light starts flashing. She slams against the door again and this time there is a slight give and she hisses, rears back to hit it again, and then -

“Captain America.”

A cruel, clipped voice that seems to come from everywhere at once. It cuts through the fog of rage and confusion, through the siren scrambling her brain. She freezes, turns slowly around. There is nothing there.

“Hello, Captain.”

She looks up, looks across the cavern, tries to locate the source of the voice but somehow she is _inside_ of it, and she can’t get out.

“I have activated the factory’s self-destruct sequence, Captain Rogers. This displeases me greatly. This facility cost me a great deal of time and money.”

She starts to hammer at the door again.

“The sound you hear is the warning siren, which means that the facility and everything in it will soon be destroyed.”

The door gives another inch. She feels something crack in her shoulder.

“Despite that, Captain, I must say I am pleased to finally make your acquaintance, even in this indirect manner. It is too bad we will not get to meet in a more… personal way. I know who you really are, you see. Erskine’s final experiment.”

The last word drips with hatred. The door shudders.

“You will die here, Captain Rogers. You cannot hope to defeat me. No matter how many weapons are destroyed here today, I still have the greatest weapon known to man at my command. This facility is nothing compared to what I have yet to do.”

The voice gives a low, evil chuckle, and Stevie feels it in her spine.

Then the door wrenches free of its hinges at last and she tumbles into a small, dimly lit room.

There is a computer on the wall, surrounded by a bank of monitors. The endlessly scrolling text casts the room in a sickly green glow. There is a small metal tray covered with surgical instruments, glinting cruelly in the low light. There is a drain set into the floor, ringed in something dark. There is a small steel thing that looks bizarrely like a refrigerator.

And in the center of the room, there, on a table barely the size of her body, a table that she is strapped to by every limb, is Buffy Barnes.

Stevie feels her stomach plummet, feels a swooping, heady terror, and she scrambles to her feet, leaning over the table. Buffy's eyes are closed and her skin is gray in the half-light. Stevie can't see her chest move, can't see if she's breathing, and she feels a dark horror closing its jaws around her heart.

“Buffy,” she says urgently, shaking her shoulder. “Buffy, it’s me. It’s Stevie. Buffy.”

Buffy's head lolls back and forth. She doesn't stir.

Her face blurs as Stevie's eyes fill with tears.

“Buff,” she says. “Buffy, you can’t.”

Her fingers slip from Buffy's shoulder to hang useless at her side. She bows her head over the table.

“Five,” says Buffy.

Stevie’s breath whoops back into her lungs in one painful lurch. She heaves a sob so violent that it hurts her ribs.

 _Alive_.

“Five,” Buffy repeats. “Seven. Zero. Three. Eight.”

Her eyes move under closed lids.

“Sergeant. Elizabeth Barnes.”

Her eyes open, dark blue and vacant. Her pupils are dilated almost to the edge of her irises.

“Three. Two. Five. Five.”

Her eyes roll slowly, so slowly, until they are looking at Stevie. She blinks. “Seven.”

Stevie touches her face, her shoulder. “Buffy,” she says again. “Buff. It’s me.”

Buffy looks at her. Something flickers behind her eyes.

“It’s me. It’s Stevie.”

The corner of Buffy’s mouth twitches.

Her eyes focus suddenly, pupils contracting almost to pinpoints before they settle at a normal size.

Her lips curve slowly into a weak half-smile, cracking as the smile widens.

“Stevie,” she says. “Stevie.”

Stevie smiles through the urge to burst into tears, chest hitching as she touches Buffy’s face. “Let’s get you out of here, Buff,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

She undoes the restraints as quickly as she can, feeling a fresh swell of anger as she looks at Buffy’s mangled wrists, her bruised ankles. There is an IV stand in the corner of the room; her mind skitters over that fact and then away as fast as it can. As soon as Buffy is free Stevie puts her hand on the back of her neck and pulls her close, wrapping her arms as tightly around her as they’ll go. Buffy’s skin is fever-hot and clammy, but her arms come up and she digs her fingers into Stevie's back as she hugs her hard, shuddering. Stevie buries her face in Buffy’s hair, breathing her in, and finally she pulls away to look at her face, drawn and pale and achingly familiar. A thousand words wrestle on the tip of her tongue and she feels, briefly, as though she will drown in them.

“I thought you were dead,” she says at last.

Buffy is looking at her strangely, curiously. She reaches out to touch Stevie’s face, her shoulder, the place where her collarbones would be if the suit fit her body. Her lips are still bleeding, and her voice is hoarse and strained when she says, “I thought… I thought you were smaller.”

Stevie helps her stand, her head barely level with Stevie’s chin. She folds Buffy into the crook of her body, letting her lean heavily against her.

“Can you walk?” she asks now, feeling her unsteadiness.

“Yeah,” says Buffy breathlessly, grimacing. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”

“Dugan said there were others,” Stevie remembers abruptly.

Buffy’s face goes ashen and she looks down, swallows hard.

“Not anymore,” she says quietly.

Then the first explosion knocks them both to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love the Howling Commandos. Honestly I want to write six thousand more fics that are just The Adventures of the Howling Commandos but No One Dies And Everything's Great. Maybe they'll come over in the Brooklyn Avengers-verse. Anyway, I decided to end this one here because Red Skull gets his own chapter or at least part of one and also there is a scene at the end of the next one that I have already written and I just don't want that chapter to be too short or too long or. Anyway. Thank you for still being here. Feedback/comments are welcome and appreciated.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Red Skull gives 'em the old razzle-dazzle. Our heroine gets a little gay.

Stevie swears viciously as the room shakes around them, getting to her feet as quickly as she can. She hauls Buffy up off the floor, more roughly than she should, but there's no time. "C'mon, Buff," she grunts, moving them toward the door. Buffy's head sways dangerously, but she staggers alongside her, her steps becoming more even as they leave the lab. Stevie sucks in a breath as they enter the factory floor. 

There is smoke everywhere, fire and blue light, and together they create an impenetrable wall and Stevie cannot see anything. The siren is still wailing, burrowing into her skull, and she shuts her eyes tightly as she tries to remember what the cavern looks like. There is a rumbling, and then a deafening roar, and she sees a flash in the distance like faraway lightning. "We have to go up," she says tersely, barely able to hear her own voice. "I can't see anything."

Buffy nods. "Stairs," she mouths. "Behind the lab."

They wheel around, hugging the wall as they shuffle along the edge of the lab. She shoves Buffy up the stairs in front of her, reasoning that if she falls backward she'll be able to catch her. They spiral up through the smoke and the crackling heat, the siren blaring, a white light flashing, the blue light suffusing everything, and Stevie has a brief, fragmented thought which is  _this is the light that killed me the light in the machine_ and then she slams into Buffy, who has come to a stop at the top of the stairs, and they both fall down.

She digs her fingers into the steel grating of the floor, prepares to shove herself up off the ground once again, and she hears that laugh. No longer all around her but  _near_ her, in front of her, and her blood seems to slow and freeze in her veins. She looks up.

They are on a large platform, the metal grille rapidly becoming hot to the touch as the factory burns below them. There is a catwalk in front of them, which seems to lead to a door, and standing in the middle of that catwalk is a man in a black duster. 

"Hello, Captain," he says in a silky voice. "How nice to get the chance to see you in the flesh after all."

She gets to her feet, one arm outstretched toward Buffy. She darts a glance at her. Her face is drawn and bone-white; she is standing, but clutching the rail of the platform like her life depends on it. Her eyes are fixed on a shadow across the catwalk.

She looks back at the man. "You're Schmidt, right? Heard a lot about you from the boys downstairs."

Her voice does not shake.

His lip curls. "Yes, how noble of you to free them. They will not get far."

As if to contradict him, there is another, smaller explosion in the distance, and she thinks she can hear shouting. Something that sounds like cannon fire. Gunfire. Tongues of blue flame lick into the air. 

"Hope you're not a betting man."

His jaw tightens, but his eyes stay fixed on her.

"Come closer," Schmidt says. "Let me see you."

Stevie squares her shoulders and steps toward him. His face twists with disgust. 

"So this is the pinnacle of modern science," he sneers. "Even with the serum you are no match for me. Erskine was a fool to choose you."

She shrugs. "At least I was an improvement on his last model."

Schmidt's eyes widen and then narrow, his nostrils flaring as he struggles to maintain his composure. "How dare you," he hisses. "You have no idea what I am capable of."

Stevie pauses, as if to consider her response, and then she lunges at him.

He's fast, he's goddamn  _fast_ , and he dodges her almost effortlessly. She swings the shield around, trying to salvage the momentum, and gets him below the chin with it. She feels the left sleeve of the uniform tear along the seam. He cries out and staggers, black-gloved hands coming up into a boxing stance, and then they're fighting in earnest. She rolls her right arm, tearing the other sleeve, and for the first time since she put on the uniform she's comfortable in it. The gunfire in the distance is louder, and she's sure she can hear shouting now. The blue light sizzles underneath it all, and she thinks,  _Get them out, Dugan. Just get them out_.

She's smaller through the shoulders than he is, but just as tall, and she's lighter on her feet. She weaves, using the smoke to her advantage, drawing him toward her and then slipping in under his outstretched arms to crack his ribs. As soon as he lowers his hands she strikes him hard in the face, her bleeding knuckles smearing his skin red. He shoves her away, kicks her in the chest, and she goes down hard onto her back. She feels Buffy's hand in hers and then she's yanked off her feet, flung forward back into Schmidt. He's breathing hard, with anger rather than exertion, and she knows his control is slipping. She gets in another good hit, feeling the bone of his eye socket crunch under her hands, and before he can retaliate she kicks him in the inner thigh, dropping him to one knee. 

As she watches him, bouncing on the balls of her feet, she listens. The shouting has stopped, and the only light in the cavern is the red-gold of the burning machines. She has no way of knowing, but somehow Stevie feels it in her bones. The 107th is out. 

"Looks like my men came through after all, Schmidt," she taunts him. "Can't wait to debrief them back at camp after I'm done with you." 

He roars in frustration and brings up his hands, but he makes no move toward her. Instead, his eyes on hers, he peels off his gloves. His hands look oddly red in the firelight, she notices. Like he's dipped them in blood. She watches as he presses them to his face, then -  _no, that can't be right, it can't_ \- into it.

He digs his fingertips into his face, gouging at his eyes, fingers slipping into the sockets up to the knuckle. Stevie has stopped moving, her hands dropping to her sides, her stomach heaving. She can't process what is happening. Then Schmidt hooks his thumbs underneath his jaw. 

Stevie watches, horror rising cold inside her, as he peels his skin loose from under his chin. The flesh of his throat glistens raw and red, his hands working under the skin of his face as it crumples and tears, and he utters a cry of pain as it comes free and then releases it into the fire raging below the catwalk. 

He stands, unfolding from the ground to his full height as if pulled by a string, and the firelight casts misshapen shadows across the hollows of his terrible true face. 

Stevie screams.

His skin - if it  _is_ skin - is burnt red, stretched tight across the bones of his head, a lipless, noseless deathmask that reflects the flickering light, his eyes glittering madly from deep red shadows.  _The Devil_ , Stevie thinks nonsensically.  _He is the Devil._   

"You see, Captain?" he shrieks, spittle flying from his mouth. "It does not matter what you know or what you do.  _I_  am the coming of the new order!  _I_ am the superior man!  _I_ am the super soldier, Erskine's greatest success, and you cannot hope to defeat me!"

He stalks toward her where she stands, rooted to the platform. "He knew you could never match me, knew  _no one_ could ever match me, and still he tried. Because he was  _afraid_ , Captain. Afraid of what I could  _do_. Afraid of my  _power_."

She cannot move, transfixed by the gleaming eyes, by the sharply-etched planes of the red skull, and he is almost upon her when Buffy says, "You don't have one of those, right?"

A laugh startles out of her lungs like a flock of birds, shakes her from her paralysis, and Schmidt's face isn't even finished forming the expression of surprise before her fist smashes into it, spinning him backwards away from her. He howls in outrage, staggering into the railing, and turns to face her, his chest heaving.

There is another explosion then, closer than the others, and it shakes the catwalk so hard that Stevie stumbles. Something in the ceiling breaks and falls, striking her on the head, and blood starts pouring into her eyes almost immediately. She rips off the mask, swiping at her eyes, using the thin blue cloth to try and stanch the bleeding. She sees the shadow across the cavern move, hit something on the wall, and then there is a hiss and a clang and the catwalk begins to separate, drawing Schmidt away from her. 

Drawing their only route to the door away from them. 

She raises her head and meets Schmidt's gaze, and there is a dark light in his eyes. He watches her for a long moment, a slow, triumphant smile wreathing his face, and then he turns on his heel and strides toward the door. The shadow opens the door, and light flashes off his tiny round glasses as he follows Schmidt out of the cavern. Stevie turns to Buffy, whose eyes are fixed once more on the departing figure. 

"Buff," she says. "You gotta go."

Buffy's eyes shift to her face. "What?" Her skin is waxy, her color still pale. 

"That's the only way out. We're almost out of time." Stevie gestures to the catwalk, still rumbling away from them. "You gotta jump."

Buffy nods, and Stevie can actually see her gathering herself back into her skin. Composure settles over her face and for the first time she looks like the girl Stevie remembers, about to knock someone out. Purposeful. 

She launches herself toward the catwalk, the sure-footed sprint that Stevie knows like her own breath, and flings herself out across the cavern. She just makes it, lands hard on the other side of the catwalk, rolling so far that she has to hook an arm over the railing to keep herself on the narrow structure. The catwalk rumbles to a stop as she gets to her feet, motions for Stevie to follow.

Stevie looks at the gap, at the fire down below, and she feels something cold and final creep into her bones. She cannot make this jump. The factory is crumbling around them. She knows Buffy can lead those men to safety - knows she can find her way back to Italy, to camp - but she won't be able to if she's trapped in here waiting for Stevie to find another way out.

"You go!" she shouts, trying to be heard over the fire and the siren. Buffy shakes her head.

"Go!" she yells again, waving her arms, motioning toward the door. 

Buffy presses herself against the railing of the catwalk and screams, so loud it sounds like she's standing right next to her. 

"No! Not without you!"

Stevie feels a surge of love and frustration and terror, her veins humming with it, but she's always known better than to argue with Buffy Barnes. 

She closes her eyes, her feet slamming against the metal as she runs, and then she is leaping, toes pushing off, each muscle in her legs uncoiling one after another, and there is a brief breathless moment that feels like eternity as she hangs in the air, smoke filling her lungs, and then she slams hard into the edge of the catwalk, her arms scrabbling for purchase as the weight of her body drags her down. She clutches at the grille, her bloody right hand slipping, and then Buffy is there, hands around her wrists, hauling her upward with the strength of her entire body, and then they are both lying sprawled on the catwalk. 

She looks at Buffy. "Thanks."

"You're heavier than you used to be. You owe me."

"No," she says. "For - back there. With Schmidt. That _face_."

Buffy smiles that lopsided grin. "Someone's gotta get you out of your head, Rogers."

"Who was that?" Stevie asks as they get to their feet and lope toward the door. "With him."

She doesn't see Buffy's face go still, but she hears hatred and fear in her voice as she says, "Doctor Zola."

The door slams open onto a balcony, a narrow parapet with a tether flapping loose at its end. She can see the lights of the plane disappearing into the sky. 

They climb down the series of scaffolds that frame the factory, as many walkways outside as there are in, and as they jump down into the grass Stevie can see a light flashing in the distance, in the direction of the forest. 

"They made it," she says to Buffy. "Think you can run just a little longer?"

"I can do this all day," Buffy shoots back. "Lead the way, Captain."

 

Dugan is waiting in the trees with the rest of the men - almost five hundred of them - and he beams as Stevie and Buffy jog toward them. "Barnes," he says, sweeping her into a bear hug. He looks over her shoulder at Stevie. "Alright, Captain. You can stay."

Stevie smiles. "I think none of us should stay, Dugan." She pats around her belt for the transponder, her heart sinking as she realizes its absence. "Shit."

"What?" asks the skinny one from the cage, the one who'd fought the Brit.

"Our ride," she says, unsure how to finish the sentence. 

He grins. "No worries, Cap," he says, holding up a ring of keys. "We brought our own."

 

The convoy trucks are parked further into the forest. The wounded and those too weak to walk are loaded in first, and the rest of them simply walk. Buffy insists on walking with Stevie, despite the fact that she's almost stumbling with exhaustion. The skinny guy - Morita - walks with them in front, along with Dugan and the Brit, whose name turns out to be James Montgomery Falsworth. 

"Really," says Stevie drily. "And you were upset about 'Captain America'."

The Frenchman, Dernier, keeps an eye on Buffy, conversing with her in a low stream of syllables that Stevie can't make out. "She is not concussed," he reports, "but she keeps calling you Stevie,  _Capitaine_."

Stevie feels the blush rise to her cheeks as she realizes she's not wearing the mask. She wonders if there's enough blood on her face to hide her features as she says, "Ah, that's - it's, uh -"

"Pet name," says Buffy from behind her. "Old friends." She slides back into French without another word, slinging her arm around Dernier to take some of her weight.

Dugan looks at her sidelong for a moment.

"You know, Captain," he says after the others have resumed their conversations. "Barnes is the best of us. And we all know it."

She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground ahead.

"We never had a woman with us before, but she's worth every last one of us. More than that. She's a good goddamn soldier. And if anyone tried to tell us otherwise, well - we'd have a problem with that fella."

She flicks a glance at him. He is smiling the faintest of smiles. 

"We're proud to serve with her. That's all I mean."

With that he drifts away toward the rear of the caravan, barking something at the men behind the trucks. 

* * *

Phillips is furious. She can see that on his face before they're even fully into camp. The trucks are still rumbling in behind them, and he looks like a thunderstorm waiting to happen. Peggy's eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot but she beams at Stevie, rushes up to her and hugs her tightly. 

"What the hell happened?" she demands as soon as she releases her. "I said to call!"

Stevie smiles guiltily. "I lost the little radio," she says ruefully.

Peggy punches her in the arm, but lightly. 

"In my defense, it was very small."

Phillips is walking toward them, his face dark. Buffy clocks this and steps forward to Stevie's side. Her voice rings out strong and clear.

"Hey, let's hear it for Captain America!"

The resulting roar of applause stops Phillips in his tracks, but Stevie is looking at Buffy, at the strange sadness in her eyes as she claps, as she smiles. She reaches out for her.

"I don't know about you lads," Falsworth says, blithely sailing up between them, "but I need a drink."

* * *

They leave the bar laughing and stumbling into a light misting rain, Buffy weaving just slightly. She elbows Stevie, who is discreetly trying to keep her on the sidewalk.

"You have - you had 's many drinks as me," she says, voice blurred. "Used to could drink you under the table."

Stevie laughs. "I weigh more than you now."

"And you're taller."

"I told you it would happen."

"Mm. You didn't tell me you were gonna gloat about it, though."

"I would never," says Stevie gravely. "On the other hand-" She stops walking, pauses for a second. Then she scoops Buffy up in one quick motion, surprising both of them. "The time has come!" she yells into the empty street, spinning Buffy around in wide, dizzy circles. "Steve Rogers, finally bigger than Buffy Barnes!" Buffy kicks her feet and yells in protest but she's laughing, and she slings her arm around Stevie's neck to take some of her weight as they turn.

"If you throw up, aim that way." She lets Buffy down gently, steadying her as she finds her feet.

"Stevie," she says, still a little breathless.

"Yeah?"

Buffy laughs again, shakes her head. "Still not used to calling you Steve."

"I'm still not used to being Steve," Stevie says. A strange dark fear steals into her chest, curls there sharp and bitter.

"What's wrong?"

Even drunk, even after months apart, Buffy can read her better than anyone. She sighs, rakes a hand through her hair.

"I dunno, Buff," she says quietly. "I'll get to fight now, and that's what I wanted, but... not like this. Not _as_ this. Everyone's watching now. Everyone knows who I am."

"Everyone already knew who you were," says Buffy with a grin. "Saw the commercials."

Stevie does something with her face that is meant to be a smile, and abruptly Buffy understands. She puts her hands on Stevie's shoulders.

"They have - they have so much faith in me," Stevie says, voice trembling. "But they don't know who I am. They believe in Captain America, but what if - what if I'm not good enough to be Captain America?"

"You _are_ Captain America," Buffy says matter-of-factly, giving her a tiny shake. Stevie laughs softly, tucking her chin into her chest. 

"I'm just so scared," she whispers. "Of doing something wrong. Getting someone hurt. Just because I'm the one with the name."

Buffy looks up at her, eyelashes beaded with rain.

"Listen, Rogers. Those men in there didn't agree to follow you because you're Captain America, even if they think that's why. They're following you because -" she sways a little, grips Stevie's shoulders more tightly - "because you're _good_. Because you can do this."

Stevie puts a hand on her waist to steady her.

"Besides, I _know_ who you are, and I'm still with you," she continues, and her left eyebrow arches. "I don't care what they call you. You're still that skinny kid from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight. So I'm gonna fight beside you."

She steps closer then, tentative, and reaches up and strokes Stevie's hair from her temple all the way to the short soft buzz at the nape of her neck.

"It's gonna be okay, Stevie."

Stevie feels the fear ebb away, something distantly familiar settling in its place, an echo of that long-ago unnameable feeling, and then suddenly - so suddenly it makes her suck in a breath like she's been burned - suddenly it has a name.

_Oh_ , she thinks. _Oh_.

_This._

They stand there like that, Buffy's hand on the back of Stevie's neck, for a breath, a fraction of a breath, it cannot be more than a blink but Stevie feels it stretch out around them like taffy. She doesn't move - she can't move, she doesn't know what to do with her hands, her body, her lips - and then Buffy's hand slips out of her hair and time resumes its flow and nothing has changed except the entire landscape of Stevie's being.

She realizes her hand is still on Buffy's waist, and Buffy's hands are still on her shoulders. Her heart is beating so hard she thinks it must be audible. They look at each other for the briefest moment before Buffy laughs nervously, abruptly, and steps away from her.

"You're gonna keep the outfit, though, right?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, we are back! Thank you for your patience. I am currently trying to wrap up the first draft of a book I am writing and it is slowly shredding my soul into little bitty pieces so. Also, okay, full disclosure, I am writing another fic currently for the garden 'verse in which Bucky brings home a haunted armchair. So!!! Delays. I'm sorry. Anyway. Thank you for reading! Thank you for not giving up on this! As always feedback/comments are welcome and appreciated and lovely! xx


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.

“You’re killin’ me, Rogers,” Buffy says into her ear as she slings herself onto the back of Stevie’s bike. Stevie slews the bike across the forest floor and accelerates. “What?”

“You keep looking at me after I make a shot.”

“I’m just trying to keep morale up! It’s important to let your soldiers know they’re doing good work.”

“Not your covert snipers, you jerk.” Buffy thumps her lightly on the back. “I’m up a goddamn tree and they see you salute me, and you know what they do then? They _shoot at me_. Why do you think I’m always already running when you pick me up?”

“Fair point.” They shoot out of the woods onto a small winding road. She can see the dust of Dugan’s truck in the distance. “I just want you to know I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, but tell me at _camp_. I can wait, I promise.”

Stevie laughs and guns the engine.

* * *

They keep missing Schmidt, just barely - he touches down and flits away, but each time they get a little closer. The Howling Commandos - Stevie smiles to herself as she thinks about that night in the bar, the night Dernier proclaimed them _les loups_ and bayed at the moon as they stumbled home arm in arm - the Howling Commandos had enough information among the six of them to form a plan.

“Schmidt’s not careful,” Dugan had muttered, slashing red X’s across a map. “He didn’t think any of us were getting out alive.”

“So all these are factories?” Stevie tapped the paper.

“Yeah. More weapons facilities.” Morita looked disgusted. “All that blue shit.”

“We don’t know his plan, though. We don’t know what all these weapons are _for_.”

Dernier elbowed in to add another slash (Dugan muttering “I was _getting_ there” under his breath) and looked at Stevie. “We do not need to know what they are for, _capitaine_. We only need to destroy them.”

Dugan scoffed. “We know what they’re for. They’re for killing anyone that gets in Schmidt’s way.”

Stevie hadn’t responded, had only looked at the line of red X’s marching away across Europe. _In the way of doing what, though_ , she wondered.

They wind their way across countries, destroying factories in Italy, in Poland, in France and Greece and Czechoslovakia. They free prisoners and sabotage communications where they can. They skirt the edges of the Reich, stealth missions into Belgium and Austria, and every time they get back to camp one of them takes the pen and slashes a thick black line across the red. They’re making progress, but Stevie doesn’t know toward what, and it makes her edgy. Even as the line of crossed-out X’s grows she feels a gnawing sense of unease. She feels that they’re missing something.

She’s in the tent cleaning her guns, Schmidt peeling off his face playing on repeat in her mind, when Peggy ducks under the flap.

“ _Allo_ ,” she says, in a very passable impression of Dernier. Stevie grins at her, clicks the safety on and puts the pistol on the bed. “Peg.”

Peggy sits down cross-legged on the ground. Stevie slides down to sit facing her.

“Another one tomorrow,” she says.

“Yeah. We think it’s one of the more important ones.”

She smiles fiercely. “I know.”

“I wish you could come,” Stevie says impulsively. “I mean - you know.”

Peggy nods. “I do, too.”

They sit there in silence for a few moments. Finally Peggy looks at her. “Your friend. Is she - is she alright?”

Stevie doesn’t really know how to answer this. They haven’t talked about it - Buffy was in the general debrief, she hasn’t done a one-on-one - and Stevie gets the feeling that she doesn’t want to. She sleeps uneasily, restlessly, and Stevie can hear her murmuring through the thin canvas wall of the tent every night. Sometimes it’s her own name, sometimes Stevie’s, sometimes it’s Russian. It all sounds like fear, and Stevie lies there awake and her heart cracks open, because she doesn’t know how to help her. During the day she’s almost normal. During the day she has the mission to focus on, to shore her up, and Stevie can only pretend that she doesn’t know it’s a lie. She can’t _make_ Buffy talk to her, but it hurts that she won’t. It hurts that she doesn’t trust Stevie enough to tell her what happened.

“She’s fine,” she says at last, aware that the silence has gone on too long. Peggy lifts an eyebrow, and the corner of her mouth tightens, but she lets the answer stand.

“How are you?” Stevie asks her. She looks a little worn, although it’s impossible to say how. Her lipstick is perfect, as is her hair - Stevie is momentarily grateful to be Steve, if this is what women are supposed to look like in the army - but she looks different in the eyes, somehow. She looks almost defeated.

“Ah, you know,” she says, waving a hand. “Phillips is making noise about sending me back to the States with Stark. _‘We need your expertise on the homefront, Carter,’_ ” she says in a deep voice. “ _‘We need a woman’s touch back in the Pentagon.’_ ”

Stevie makes an involuntary sound of disgust. Peggy laughs. “I know. I don’t think they’ll let him do it. He just doesn’t like that you only listen to me.”

“You’re the only reasonable one in command.”

“Well, _I_ know. And Stark knows. And you know, and now that Phillips has to let you fight, he’ll know. As soon as he gets his head out of his -” She stops. “Well.”

“Is that all, though?” Stevie doesn’t want to press her, but she feels there’s something lurking below the surface. It’s hard to rattle Peggy, and Phillips doesn’t warrant it.

Peggy shrugs. “I just have a bad feeling sometimes, Rogers. More often than not, lately. A sort of creeping dread, a feeling like… imminent danger. It’s very English of me, I think, but-” She waves a hand. “It makes me a good agent.”  

“Oh. I think Monty has that, a little. It doesn’t make him good at anything, though. Maybe complaining.”

She gets a smile then, a little one, but it feels good.

“You’re my hero, Peg,” she says quietly, digging a little furrow into the ground with her fingernail. “You know? You’re everything I never thought I could be.”

Peggy colors very slightly and looks at her lap. “You did all right yourself, Captain.”

“I was trained by the best.”

She rolls her eyes at that, but she still looks pleased. “Well.” She gets to her feet, brushing at the seat of her trousers. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Briefing is at 0400.”

She turns back before she ducks under the flap. “Get some rest.”

She doesn’t, though. She lies awake, looking at the pitched canvas ceiling, awash in a sea of guilt and shame.

The other reason she hasn’t pressed Buffy about her time in the HYDRA facility is that she’s afraid to be alone with her for too long. She’s afraid she won’t be able to stop herself from saying something, doing something stupid, something inadvisable and reckless and ruinous. Every time they’re near each other she feels like her entire body is lighting up, a spotlight in the darkness, and she thinks _She must know. She must know but she_ can’t _know because I don’t know what she’ll do. I don’t know what I’ll do._ So she’s kept to the group, to herself, and she misses Buffy’s companionship like a lost limb, but she’d rather die than make her uncomfortable. She’d rather die than ask something of her she can’t give, won’t give. She won’t do that to her.

She puts her hands over her face and groans quietly.

There is a small swift scratching sound from her left, and she rolls toward the cloth of the wall. “Buff?” she whispers.

“Stevie,” comes Buffy’s voice. It sounds like her lips are pressed right up against the canvas, and Stevie leans closer involuntarily. “Are you okay?”

“Stevie, there’s something wrong with me,” Buffy says, and Stevie hears something not-quite-right in her voice.

“Buff, are you asleep?”

“He did something to my brain. He put needles in me. Needles all over.”

Stevie shudders hard. “Buffy.” Her voice is sharper, louder. “Wake up.” She thumps on the canvas and hears Buffy shift. “Wha.”

“You’re talking in your sleep.”

“Shit,” Buffy says under her breath. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I just - are you - do you want to talk?”

There is a long silence, punctuated only by their breathing.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Buffy says at last. “Zola.”

Stevie waits, the long line of her body pressed against the canvas.

“When we first got there. He took me and some of the others because we looked weak. Like we’d be easy to break. He tortured us.”

Stevie shuts her eyes. She feels Buffy roll toward the wall of the tent, the heat of her body reaching out.

“I didn’t tell him anything _._ _Besides name, rank, and serial number, I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability,_ ” she recites. “I just kept thinking that, and then I’d repeat my numbers. Over and over. And at first he was really angry, he was… He killed some of the others, to see if that would… if we would…”

Stevie hears tears in her voice. She presses the palm of her hand to the wall.

“Something changed after - I don’t know, I don’t know how long it was - maybe the first month. He stopped trying to get information. He drugged me, I think. I don’t remember a lot of it. I would wake up and he’d be talking to me in Russian, only I couldn’t understand it, and there would be needles and tubes and-”

The sentence cuts off in a hard, gasping sob.

“I don’t feel right, Stevie,” she whispers raggedly. “I don’t feel right and I don’t know why.”

Stevie feels her shift, feels her back press against the canvas under her palm. She rubs little circles into Buffy’s back as she cries, whispering, _You’re okay. You’re okay now. I’ve got you. You’re okay._

Gradually Buffy’s breathing slows, becomes more even, and smooths out into the rhythm Stevie knows from childhood, deep round breaths that mean she’s asleep.

Stevie closes her eyes, nestles closer to the canvas, and follows her down into unconsciousness.

They’re still pressed together on either side of the wall when the bell wakes them. Buffy moves first, bouncing off her cot with a force that surprises Stevie, although she’s not sure why - Buffy’s always had to drag her out of bed.

“Morning,” she calls, rolling her neck, wondering if she should mention last night. She hears a creak as Buffy flops back down onto her bed. “Hey, Rogers. You getting dressed?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, relieved, but strangely disappointed. “Be right out.”

“Stevie?”

“Yeah.” She’s paused, one foot poised above her boot.

“Thanks for - you know. I feel - better.”

If Stevie notices the hesitation in her words, she doesn’t mention it.

“‘Course, Buff,” she says, jamming her foot into the boot. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“‘Til the end of the line,” Buffy says almost happily, her voice fainter as she moves out of her tent.

“‘Til the end of the line,” Stevie murmurs, pulling on her gloves. Then she stands, grabs the shield, and walks out into the still-dark morning.

Peggy looks better this morning, less wary, and she leads them through the drop with an alertness that is almost hostile given Stevie’s current state. She sits on a bench, leaning heavily on the edge of the shield, trying desperately to look like she’s fully awake. Peggy keeps thwapping a metal pointer against the wall of the command tent as she talks. Buffy also looks better, and unlike Stevie, she’s fully engaged.

“So once we get in, we’re looking for this little office,” she says, leaning in to inspect the blueprint of the factory. There is a small box in the upper right-hand corner that’s been circled in red, with an arrow pointing to it, and a scribbled notation in Dugan’s handwriting which reads “BASTARD HERE”. Peggy looks at the annotated box and then back at Buffy.

“Yes,” she says without a touch of irony. Then the pointer slaps down again, this time on the map underneath the blueprint. Buffy does a very admirable job of only flinching a tiny bit. “Your transport will be waiting here-” _thwap_ “-at 0800 hours. You must not be late. We have a very limited window after we disable the HYDRA anti-aircraft machines and we’re still not sure how they work, so that window is an estimate at best.” _Thwap_. “If for some reason you are unable to reach the transport, you will have to reach this extraction point three klicks to the south by 0900 hours. I would very much prefer not to orchestrate an extraction under these conditions, so please, _please_ be efficient.”

“You know we _walked_ back the first time, right?”

Peggy’s stare almost cuts Morita in half, but she doesn’t reply. She turns back to the wall.

“The man you are looking for is a low-level HYDRA transportation officer. He does not know how the operation works, but he will be able to tell us where Schmidt is going next. No,” she says, correctly interpreting Jones’ raised hand, “we do not have a photo. The communique that we decrypted simply states that someone responsible for the transportation of assets will be at that factory today. I can’t imagine there will be many other HYDRA agents there, but-”

She smiles a slightly frightening smile. “If there are, just bring them all.”

She collapses the pointer viciously.

“Any questions?”

The tent is very silent. Then Buffy speaks.

“Are we sure this isn’t a trap?”

Eight pairs of eyes fix on her face. Phillips makes a strangled sound.

“I mean - Peggy and I are probably the best codebreakers here, but - even for us - that wasn’t exactly a difficult one. Doesn’t it seem, I don’t know, a little too convenient?”

Phillips curls his lip. “I hate to tell you this, Sergeant, but Johann Schmidt doesn’t care enough about you to lay a trap for you. We’re playing catch-up here, and he knows it. We got lucky and it still may not be enough to figure out what the hell the sonofabitch is doing.”

Stevie sighs and offers her first and only contribution. “He’s probably right, Buff.”

Hurt flashes in Buffy’s eyes, just for a moment, but Stevie sees it.

“You heard what he said to me in the factory,” she says. “He thinks I’m a joke. A failed experiment.”

Phillips sucks his teeth, leans back in his chair.

“Yeah, well, what makes you so sure he feels that way about the rest of us? The Commandos put a pretty serious dent in his forces there.”

“Buff, I’m not saying-”

“It’s better if he underestimates us,” Dugan cuts in smoothly, adjusting his hat. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least consider the possibility that he doesn’t. Barnes. What’s your move?”

“It’s just a slight readjustment,” she says, already scrabbling for a pen. “We shouldn’t drop all of us in one place - if they’re expecting us, that’s exactly what they’d want us to do. And we need to find a different way into the building - if whatshisname is in that office, you can bet it’ll be fortified to hell. We need you coming in here, Dugan, and me here, and Monty…”

She outlines the plan as the rest of them watch. “They’re expecting Steve,” she finishes triumphantly. “But I wager they haven’t figured out yet that it’s always the same men with him.”

“The rest of us ain’t wearin’ a bloody flag,” mutters Falsworth. Morita elbows him.

“So Steve and I - I’m pretty distinguishable too, unfortunately, and Schmidt may remember me from the factory - and, let’s say, Morita go in the front door, guns blazing, while the rest of us close in quietly. They won’t know how many of us to expect, I bet - then while they’re trying to knock Steve’s teeth in we can grab the guy, duck out with him, and then rendezvous at the transport.”

She looks at Peggy hopefully. “It’s not much different, it’s just - less direct than we’ve been doing it. We’ve never had the chance for a capture before.”

Peggy nods. “I think you’re right.” Phillips opens his mouth, but she holds up a hand. “You’re putting yourself, Captain Rogers, and Private Morita in a fair amount of jeopardy, Sergeant. You are aware of that.”

“I am, ma’am,” says Buffy quickly. “But we can handle it.”

Morita doesn’t say anything snippy, which means he agrees.

Stevie looks at Buffy. “Much more finesse-”

“-than the usual punching approach,” Buffy finishes, beaming at her. Stevie’s stomach does a lazy flip, apparently unaware that now is a stupid goddamn time for that sort of thing. She smiles back, hoping she looks much more professional than she feels. Then she grabs the shield and stands abruptly.

“All right, then,” she says, looking around. “Are we ready?”

* * *

The pilot, whoever he is, is marginally better than Stark. But it’s a very slim margin. Stevie feels her guts rattling around, wondering if she’s going to throw up in Dugan’s lap, but the flight is short enough that she manages to hold it together. One by one they jump - Dugan, then Falsworth, then Jones and Dernier - until it’s just Stevie and Buffy and Jim, clutching the nets tethered to the walls of the hold, waiting.

Morita whistles through his teeth, flips a thin-handled blade around with his free hand. “Kind of excited to take a prisoner this time,” he says, raising his voice above the noise of the engine. “I know we’re not supposed to be in for revenge, but…” He shrugs and flashes a wide white grin.

Buffy smiles coldly. “Who told you we’re not?”

The buzzer sounds and the hold is bathed in green light. The hatch opens slowly, the wind sucking at their clothes, trying to pull them from the plane. Morita shoves the knife back into his boot, tugs at his shoulder straps, and steps out into space, dropping immediately from sight. Stevie looks at Buffy. “I still don’t love heights,” she admits. Buffy holds out a gloved hand, gives her that lopsided closed-mouth grin. Stevie takes her hand and shuts her eyes and then there is a sharp tug on her arm and they are falling.

Buffy yanks her chute before Stevie does, ripping her up and out of her grasp, and Stevie bullets down toward the dim outline of the factory. Bullets strafe past her, just a few hundred yards away, as their transport tries its best to disable the HYDRA surface-to-air missiles. _Be easier if we knew what the hell that blue stuff was_ , she thinks as she fixes her eyes on the tiny square that is to be her landing pad.

It’s a closer landing than last time - Peggy had stressed the need to come in as low as possible, under the radar, to deal with anyone on the roof before the less indestructible Commandos landed. Consequently, it’s also a much harder landing.

_Crunch_. “Fuck!”

“ _Wer geht?”_

Shuffle, shuffle. “ _Wer geht dahin?”_

“Um. Hail HYDRA?”

Clang, crunch. This time not her own bones, which she’s thankful for. She can feel something splintery in her hip, where nothing should be splintery. She hears footsteps, marshals her limited German - why hadn’t she _practiced_ for this - and yells, “ _Alles gut! Ich habe gefallen!”_

There is a long pause. _Shit. It’s the other ‘to be’ verb, isn’t it._

“Ummm. Hail HYDRA?”

This one is quicker on his feet, but Stevie just crouches as he barrels toward her and rolls him off her back - and off the roof. She looks up, scanning the sky for parachutes. _Please let that be the last one._ She hears shouting from below, peers over the edge of the building. The crumpled HYDRA soldier is already drawing attention, two men jogging toward him. An alarmed shout goes up as the first one reaches him, and Stevie can’t make it out but the tone is clear enough. _Intruders_.

She looks up again, sees two faint white shapes billowing toward her. She sighs and flings the shield down toward the ground as hard as she can. The vibranium disc twangs off of the fire escape, knocks one of the soldiers down, and ricochets back up for her to snatch it out of the air. She hears Stark in her head. _It’s just nonsense, Rogers. This thing doesn’t obey any of the laws of physics. Completely bulletproof, light as a feather. Surprisingly aerodynamic. You’re gonna love it._

She definitely hears the word _America_ in the next volley of shouts. Well, good, she thinks as she jogs toward what she hopes is the door to the stairs. Got their attention.

Buffy lands beautifully, only to be knocked halfway across the roof by Morita as he comes in on top of her. “Will - you - get - _off_ -” Stevie hears as they struggle to untangle themselves from the chutes. She grabs one, rips the silk down the middle. “Today, please,” she hisses.

Newly extricated, Buffy stalks along the edge of the roof, scanning the ground, ready to pick off any soldiers that come outside. Stevie wrenches the door off its hinges while Morita watches, unimpressed, and they slip into the factory.

The stairs are concrete, which Stevie silently gives thanks for as it muffles their hurried footsteps. The factory is six floors high, technically, but they only pass three doors - the one they came in, one on the fourth floor, and the one they slam out of onto the main floor.

They’ve barely left the stairwell when Morita goes still. “Office,” he whispers, throwing an arm out across Stevie’s chest to point upward.

Stevie hears him, but her mind is working frantically, confused. The building isn’t as big as the others they’ve taken, not even close, but that's not what worries her. They’re standing below a platform tucked high in the corner of the building, on what once might have been a factory floor. But there is no sound of industry, no humming conveyor belts, no blue light. There is, in point of fact, almost no light at all. The factory is dark and close with trapped heat, even now, nearing dawn, and she can see faint outlines of shapes that might be machinery in the distance. _Whatever they are, they’re dead._ She hadn’t thought it would be possible for something to be more ominous than the blue light, but somehow its absence terrifies her. The building is a shell, a husk, and Stevie barely has time to think _Buffy was right_ before a shape materializes out of the gloom. It draws closer, and resolves, and then they can see it is cradling a gun.

“Good morning, Captain.”

“Oh, goddamn,” Morita says, and they both dive. The crackling burst of blue light sears the air above them, crisping the hair on the backs of their necks, and blows a hole in the wall behind them. Stevie turns the dive into a roll, kicking her feet out at the man’s knees. He swears and jumps away, the muzzle of the gun wavering, and Morita is up and lunging at his throat before he’s even taken his eyes off Stevie.

Jim has his knife out, but the man blocks it with the gun, sparks flying as metal scrapes against metal. Stevie lunges for the door wildly. “Buffy!” she yells as loudly as she can, hoping the stairwell will echo. She flings herself at the man, hammering the shield into his arm, trying to get him to drop the gun. Another burst of light streaks past her and she feels a sharp tingling _zip_ along her side that tells her she’s been hit. She twists away, arcing the shield up and back, slicing it down hard and then bringing it up into the man’s ribs, knocking him up and back away from them. “ _BUFFY!”_

Morita intercepts him before he hits the ground and then slams him down into it, a savage full-body throw. He drops down on top of him, a knee in his back, scrabbling at his hand. Stevie turns to run back up the stairs, just enough to get within earshot, and Buffy’s sleek dark form hurtles past her like a bullet. She throws a look at Stevie as she pelts toward Morita and the man. _Told you_.

“Be smug later,” Stevie snaps, and sprints away into the factory, looking for hostiles.

_I_ _f it’s an ambush, where are the rest of them?_

She estimates that by now the other three Commandos are somewhere close by, waiting for the signal to close in. They had counted on having something to blow up, though, being the diversion and all, and now she’s at a loss. She darts across the room, keeping to the wall. The thudding of flesh on flesh echoes across the factory. The sizzle of the blue light comes again and again. A man cries out in pain. She hopes it’s not Morita.

She rounds a corner into a smaller room. A bank of silent machines stands before her. She hefts the shield, then slices it forward like a discus into the side of one of them. Sparks fly, not electrical but mechanical. Destruction. She hacks at the machine, something ticking at the back of her mind, tugging. Once she’s made an opening big enough for her arm she reaches inside, starts yanking out anything within her grasp. Wires, more wires, and then - something heavy and square, almost like a car battery, something that feels potentially explosive. _Perfect,_ she thinks, lifting the shield to widen the opening. _They’ll see that for a mile-_  

The penny drops as Morita skids into the room holding the blue-light gun. “I got-”

“He’s going to bomb it,” Stevie yelps, rising from her crouch. “Run. _Now_.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, just bolts back out into the main room. “Buffy!” she yells, the shout echoing. There’s no answer, but as she draws closer to the stairwell she can hear them fighting still. She throws a look behind her, making sure Morita is there.

“You _fuck_ ,” Buffy hisses somewhere ahead of her in the gloom. “You tell me _where he is_.” The sound of a punch, but somehow too liquid - like she’s hitting raw meat. The man says something unintelligible.

“Buff, we have to go!” 

Finally she sees them, a huddled shape in the dim light, a tableau that freezes her in place.

Buffy sits astride the HYDRA soldier, hands gloved to the wrist in blood. The man’s face is pulped, flayed, a bleeding mass of soggy tissue that only looks like a face because of where it’s positioned on his body.

“Buffy,” she says on an exhale, the wind knocked out of her. “What-”

Morita hauls himself up next to her, panting. “Jesus Christ, Barnes. What the _hell._ Oh, my god.” He turns away and retches. “Jesus.”

Buffy looks up at them, hands cupped loosely in front of her, the man’s own blood dripping onto his ruined face. Her eyes are unfocused. Something shivers through her, sharpening her, and she blinks. She peers down at the man.

“He’s fine,” she says quietly. “Just surface wounds. Not even a concussion.”

She looks back at them.

“He’ll still be able to give information.”

Stevie goes to her, yanks her to her feet. “We have to go _now_ , Buff.”

Morita still looks wary, and a little nauseous. “What did you mean, he’s going to-”

“That’s why there are no other men here,” Stevie snaps, hauling the man onto her shoulders. He mumbles something against her back, and she feels blood soak almost instantly through her uniform. “He knew we were coming, but he didn’t want to waste any firepower.”

She shoulders her way bodily up the stairs to the roof, breath burning in her chest, not looking to see if they’re following her.

“OI!”

Her head snaps up. Dugan, Monty and Jones are standing there, and Dernier is over in the corner knotting the discarded parachutes together.

“What the-”

“We saw the light,” Dugan says drily. “Kind of hard to miss before the sun’s even up.”

“Thank God,” Stevie says, and lets the unconscious man slip from her shoulders. “I was worried we were gonna have to burn the place down to find you.”

“Judging from the deserted air of this place, _capitaine_ , I think someone else may beat you to it, _ouaie_?”

Dernier has dragged one end of the parachute-rope over and is now cocooning the HYDRA soldier in it. Stevie nods at Buffy. “She was right. It was a trap.”

Buffy lifts a shoulder. “Half right. Not a trap for an enemy you respect. A trap for an animal that needs to be put down.”

Stevie sees Morita’s gaze flick to her ever so briefly. “He’ll be waiting for the transport to come back,” she says abruptly. “We have to go to the secondary rally point.”

They make their way to the edge of the roof and lower the unconscious man to the ground. Stevie can see the bloom of red on white even from the roof as the others climb down. She goes last, dropping lightly to the ground beside Buffy. She turns to Morita.

“You still have that gun?”

The factory goes up nicely, the smoke almost pretty against the sunrise as they half-run, half-crouch their way to the secondary rendezvous. The HYDRA soldier bleeds down Stevie’s back and the sun dries the blood and the fabric is stiff and prickly by the time they see a truck in the distance.

* * *

The soldier looks bad, even after they clean him up. His eyes are swollen into purple, oozing bruises that he can barely see out of; his lip is split all the way to his chin. The rest of his face ranges from eggplant-purple to violent, burst-capillary red. He is battered and broken and he is a complete and utter asshole.

Stevie slams out of the tent. “Fuck!” _Slam_ isn’t even appropriate - you can’t slam a tent-flap - but she slams nonetheless. She makes a wordless sound of frustration as she paces in a tight circle. Her back is sticky with dried blood, which flakes off around her as she walks. They went straight to debriefing as soon as they got back, and they thought once the soldier woke up he’d be cooperative. She’s not sure why they thought that, given how well the rest of the mission went, but here they are.

She swears and turns away, headed to her tent. At least she can peel off the bloodstained uniform before she goes at him again. “Watch him,” she snaps at the young man posted outside the tent. He salutes and ducks inside.

She stalks across camp, her hip grating in its socket. The pain has been replaced by an annoying itching, which she knows means it’s healing, but in this moment it’s just another thing on her list of frustrations. She smacks at her hip hard, quieting the buzzing under her skin for just a moment.

“You okay, Rogers?”

Buffy peels herself out of the shadow she’s standing in. She’s cleaned herself up while Stevie’s been talking to the HYDRA soldier - _Otto_ , his name the only thing they’ve managed to get out of him - and she looks nothing like the wild-eyed girl in the factory. She’s just Buffy, looking like she’s seventeen again, wet hair tucked behind her ears, eyes soft and unlined. Stevie’s heart thumps once, hard, and settles.

“Yeah,” she says, ducking Buffy’s outstretched arm. “Lot of blood,” she explains. “You’re all clean.”

“Ah, yeah. I’m… I’m sorry about that, Stevie.”

Her lips tremble as she searches Stevie’s face. “I got carried away.”

“It happens.”

It’s true. The fog of war, and all that. Just because she’s never seen her lose control like that, just because she’s never known her to be anything less than a calculating, methodical fighter, doesn’t mean it can’t happen. She’s always one step removed from a fight, thinking ahead, waiting to drop them with a single move rather than flailing in like Stevie does. Buffy never takes it personally, Stevie realizes now, but she always has. It’s been personal for her since Jimmy Akerley snuck up and punched her low in the back, her soft little-girl kidney, for contradicting him during class. Buffy’s always been fighting for something else, for -

_For me_ , she thinks. Something squeezes inside her throat.

Buffy’s time in the HYDRA facility touched a nerve deep inside of her, hurt her in ways that Stevie knows go deeper than physical pain. She’s scared and angry, and Stevie doesn’t know why she didn’t recognize it sooner - she’s felt that way all her life. Buffy has always been stronger than her, physically and emotionally. She doesn’t know how to feel weak, how to take that feeling and turn it into something white-hot and inextinguishable. But Stevie does.

“It happens,” she says again, more firmly this time. Buffy’s face is pale, her eyes watery. “Why do you think I used to get my ass kicked so often? If I’d kept my cool even _once_ I’d have been better off.”

Buffy coughs a laugh. “I guess.”

“I’m serious, Buff,” Stevie says, motioning for her to follow. “You didn’t do anything wrong. He’ll be fine, and he’ll tell us what we need to know.” She sighs. “Hopefully.”

They duck under the flap into Stevie’s tent. She starts to peel off the suit, thankful that she’s wearing an undershirt.

“He’s not talking?” Buffy asks as she flops down onto Stevie’s bed.

“Not yet.” She turns in a circle as she tries to inspect her back. “Am I gonna have to get a bucket?”

“Probably. Hang on.” Buffy rolls off the bed and disappears. Stevie hears her banging around in her own tent as she shimmies out of the rest of the uniform. Her socks are somehow the grimiest. “How did I get blood in my _socks_ ,” she mutters as she lays them on the floor.

“You should probably just burn those.”

The color is returning to Buffy’s face by degrees; she looks almost healthy as she reenters the tent with a bucket full of water.

“Had it from earlier,” she says as she puts it on the floor next to Stevie. “Not hot, though.”

“My mom always said cold water was better for blood, anyway.”

“Not when you’re getting it off your skin.”

“Someone’s a big laundry expert all of a sudden.”

“Skin isn’t laundry!”

They laugh, and it’s the closest to normal Stevie’s felt in awhile. She reaches for the rag perched on the rim of the bucket, but Buffy grabs it. “Let me,” she says. “You can’t reach.”

“Oh. Um, okay.”

"Turn around."

Stevie stands as still as a statue, barely breathing. The cold water hits her skin and she sucks in air through her teeth, a shocked little involuntary hiss. The rag lifts away. “Sorry,” Buffy says from behind her. “Too cold?”

“No,” Stevie says, her heart pounding in her throat. “No, it’s okay.”

The rag settles onto her back again, little rivulets running down the hollow of her spine. Buffy’s fingers brush against her side, lifting the undershirt away from her skin, easing the cloth underneath. The tent is quiet, only the plink of the water as she wrings out the rag and dunks it, slowly, methodically scrubbing the blood from Stevie's skin. Stevie doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath until her head starts to spin and she takes a convulsive gasp, unable to stop herself.

“You’re shaking.”

Buffy’s voice is barely more than a whisper.

“Am I?”

_Good. Great. Very nonchalant._

A quiet _slush_ as the rag hits the water again. “Yeah, you are.”

Then something touches her back but it’s not the rag, it’s Buffy’s fingers, cold and soft. “I can feel it.”

Stevie can’t help it. She closes her eyes, tips her head back, a sigh escaping her lips as Buffy flattens her palms against her skin. “Are you sure it’s not - too cold?”

She feels the words on her back, like Buffy’s lips are just a fraction of an inch away from her. She’s breathing hard, trying to slow her heartbeat, and she realizes she can hear Buffy’s heart, too, thudding fast and rhythmic just a fraction of a second behind her own. She keeps her eyes closed for another moment, daring to hope, and then before she can talk herself out of it she turns around.

Buffy’s close, as close as Stevie thought she was, and her hands hover between them. Her chest rises and falls as she breathes, her throat working convulsively, and Stevie doesn’t think. She catches Buffy’s hands in her own, leans down, and kisses her.

Buffy shudders, so powerful that it almost breaks them apart, and for a second Stevie thinks that’s what she means to do, to pull away, and then Buffy’s hands come up behind her, fingers digging into her shoulders, and she presses her body flush against her, her mouth opening under Stevie’s lips. Stevie plunges her hand into her hair, pulling her close at the waist with the other, deepening the kiss. They’re both shaking now, leaves in a storm, and Stevie pulls away just for a moment, just enough to speak, to tell her-

Then Buffy’s hands are on her, shoving her, pushing her away hard enough that she stumbles. She stands there, chest heaving, face flushed, and she looks… horrified.

Stevie’s stomach drops like a stone. She tastes metal in the back of her throat, rising from somewhere deep inside. She realizes she’s shaking her head. _Please_ , she thinks, _please don’t-_

“No,” says Buffy, still holding one hand out. Like Stevie’s an animal she’s trying to fend off. “No!” The second cry is sharper, more painful. It tears out of her. “No.”

She drops her hand and stands there, dazed, swaying like a prizefighter. She doesn’t meet Stevie’s eyes.

“Buffy.”

Her voice shakes, and she hates herself for it. “I’m sorry.”

Buffy flinches at that, turns away, and Stevie sees the glint of tears in her eyes. She takes a step toward her, unsure, and Buffy shakes her head sharply, just once. Then she turns and leaves the tent without another word.

Stevie sits down on the bed, her head swimming, and buries her face in her hands.

She’s still sitting there two hours later, when Peggy bursts into the tent and breathlessly informed her that Otto has cracked.

“We know where Arnim Zola is,” she says triumphantly. “We move out tomorrow morning.”

Stevie looks up at her uncomprehendingly.

Peggy is too flushed with their success to notice her red-rimmed eyes, the fact that she’s sitting in her tent alone in a bloody undershirt.

“Be ready at 0600 hours,” she says. “Hope you don’t mind the cold.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. Hi. Sorry that I overcompensated for the long gap between last chapter and this chapter. Also sorry for... basically everything. To quote Tony Stark's mom-hologram (momogram?), "You know what happens next." I have most of the next chapter written already so it shouldn't be SUCH a long wait this time, but honestly I should never promise anything because I am basically the worst. Um, it should be "ich bin gefallen", if anyone cares. Comments and feedback are welcome as usual! Thank u again for sticking around! xxxx


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not called "mm whatcha say" but it might as well be. Also! also also! TWs for major character death and body horror.

Buffy hasn’t slept, or if she has, it wasn’t in her tent. Stevie knows that because she fell asleep in there waiting for her to come back, so she could - apologize? Explain? Pretend she had some kind of combat-induced insanity that made her _kiss_ people? She just needed to see Buffy, needed to see her face, to know that this was fixable. She needed to know she hadn’t broken them beyond repair.

She wakes up curled in a tight, miserable knot, her muscles aching. She uncoils herself as delicately as she can, wincing as her bones crackle under her skin. At least she managed to change last night after Peggy left her tent. She has one brief moment where she doesn’t remember, where she knows she’s supposed to be upset and she doesn’t know why, and then it all comes slamming back into her memory.

She had kissed Buffy Barnes. She had kissed her and felt _right_ , felt at _home_ , felt like everything in her whole worthless life made sense for a moment, and for just that moment - for just that moment, when Buffy kissed her back, she felt something bright and big and shining crack open inside of her, spilling light into her heart.

And then Buffy had pushed her away. Had run from her and stayed away all night. And now the light is fading, retreating, draining out of her, but the cracks are still there.

Stevie feels a tear slip down her cheek. She doesn’t move as it drips into her ear. She takes a long, shuddering breath and rolls off the cot.

Buffy will have to talk to her at some point today. The flight will be long; she can’t avoid her in the small cramped hold of the plane. She just has to figure out what to say.

She starts putting on her uniform.

_I’m sorry I kissed you_.

_I’m sorry I wanted to._

_I’m sorry I still want to._

_I’ll never do it again, please, just stay with me._

_I can’t do this without you._

_Please don’t leave me alone._

_Please forgive me._

 As it turns out, she doesn’t say any of these things.

 The briefing is short and direct. Peggy is almost leaping out of her skin with excitement, her smile more ferocious than usual. Buffy shows up right before it starts, seeming to materialize out of thin air, and sits on the ground at the edge of the group. Her eyes are bruised with lack of sleep, and there’s at least one twig in her hair that Stevie can see. _She slept on the ground_ , she thinks, and her stomach twists. She spends the briefing trying to catch her eye, but Buffy stares fixedly at Peggy, her eyes dark and distant.

“Isn’t that right, Captain Rogers?”

Stevie looks up. “What?” Instantly she wishes she could take it back. A muscle in Peggy’s cheek flexes, as if she’s clenching her teeth, but her voice is calm when she says, “The train will be heavily defended, but a discreet surprise attack should give you enough time to find Zola and remove him with minimal engagement of the enemy.”

“Uh, yes,” Stevie says. “That’s correct. Sorry, Agent Carter.”

She manages to keep her face turned toward Peggy for the next few minutes, but her mind is nowhere near the mission.

Peggy grabs her arm as they file onto the plane, and she takes a few steps away from the Commandos. Her voice is pitched low as she says, “Whatever it is, you need to leave it here.”

Stevie opens her mouth to say _I know_ but something in Peggy’s eyes stops her. She simply nods. Peggy squeezes her arm, then gives her a little push toward the plane.

Buffy sits across the hold from her, putting every other man in the squadron between them. She lies facing the wall, head pillowed on her hands, but Stevie can tell from how rigid her spine is that she’s not asleep. She turns away, toward her own wall, and goes over the mission in her mind while the men chatter around her.

After a few hours, Stevie comes out of her reverie and realizes the hold has gone quiet. She gets to her feet and crosses the plane, keeping one hand against the ceiling for balance. She sits down beside Buffy.

“Buff,” she says as quietly as she can.

Buffy doesn’t move.

She takes a deep, shaky breath.

“I’m - I - I shouldn’t have done that.”

Dernier mumbles something in French, rolling over onto his face.

“I shouldn’t - I just - I’m so sorry.” She pauses, inhales, tries to keep the tears out of her voice. “You’re my best friend.”

Buffy stirs very slightly. She doesn’t say anything.

Stevie closes her eyes and tips her head back against the wall of the plane, feeling weary and sick. Her stomach churns and rolls and she wants nothing more than to be asleep, deeply asleep, in a way she hasn’t been since the serum. She will get up and cross the hold and sit back down next to her own wall and cry there, and maybe she will close her eyes and pretend to dream. She presses her lips together, willing herself to stand.

There is a small, soft touch on the back of her hand, so light she almost thinks she imagined it, and then Buffy’s fingers slip around hers. She squeezes Stevie’s hand once, lightly, and pulls away.

“End of the line,” she mumbles, drawing her knees closer to her chest.

A sigh of relief shudders out of Stevie even as the tears start to fall, and she lets them, breathing as quietly as she can while her lungs hitch and seize. The heady swooning rush of forgiveness envelops her and she clings to it like a lifeline. _I am not sad_ , she thinks, the words drumming in her head. _I am not sad_. She sits there in the hold, surrounded by her sleeping soldiers, tears slipping down her cheeks as she stares into the dark, and just as she surrenders to sleep she thinks she hears Buffy say something in Russian. _What_ , she thinks, but the word doesn’t make it past her lips.

By the time Monty wakes them, she has forgotten it entirely.

* * *

“Fuck, it’s cold,” says Dugan, stamping his feet. They are standing in a barely-sheltered alcove high in the mountains, wind lashing at their faces in the frozen sunlight.

“Well, yeah, Dum Dum,” says Buffy as she sights down the scope of her rifle. “It’s Siberia.” She squeezes the trigger and a small metal dart bursts from the barrel of the gun. She spins a dial on her goggles, squints into the distance. There is an agonizing pause.

“Got it.” She pulls out a flat metal box and snaps it open, removing another metal dart and a coiled wire. She hands Morita the dart. He kicks the spikes of his climbing boots into the ice wall and starts moving upward. She lifts the wire as it trails behind him, and suddenly there is a loud humming sound all around them. “Planted,” comes Jim’s voice from behind them. The wire hums and shakes and suddenly snaps forward, out of Buffy’s hands, across the chasm before them.

“Bugger me,” Monty breathes. “How-”

“Stark,” Dernier says. “He has the, how you say. The super magnet. _L' électrique_.”

Monty looks at Stevie, who shrugs. “I’ve just got the shield,” she says. “That’s about the extent of my experience with Howard’s tech.”

Buffy stands up, shouldering her rifle. “Electromagnets,” she says. “The strongest in the world. This wire is ionized vibranium, and it’s held in on both ends by the entire force of the Earth’s gravity.”

Stevie eyes the hooks that Buffy is unpacking. “So you’re saying we’re definitely safe on this thing.”

Buffy smirks at her. “Safer than on the Cyclone. You won’t even know you’re moving ‘til you hit the train.”

“Yeah, speaking of-” Dugan interrupts, thrusting his wrist into Stevie’s eyeline. “We’ve got about ninety seconds before the jump needs to happen. Where’s the train?”

“It’s coming,” Stevie says placatingly. “Buff, are we ready?”

She nods. “You first.”

“Oh, good. I was gonna ask.”

“You didn’t think I was gonna let someone else get all the glory, did you?”

Stevie laughs as she clips herself onto the first hook, trying to hide her nervousness.

“First one into the fight, last one out. That’s my Rogers.”

Buffy steps in close, tugs at Stevie’s harness to make sure it’s secure. “Middle cars are the target.” Something shivers across her face. “We’re gonna get him, Stevie. We’re gonna get that bastard.”

Stevie nods, not trusting herself to speak. Buffy leans in even closer, and she parts her lips to speak, and then she shoves Stevie off the edge of the cliff.

It’s quiet on the zipline, the wind whistling past her ears. It feels almost like she’s not moving, really. The ground is so far away and the air is white and cold. She guesses she’s been moving for about sixty seconds, now, give or take a few for the beginning of the journey which were lost to panicked flailing. Another sixty seconds, she thinks. She can hear the train.

It rushes up toward her, in the end. She breaks through a bank of clouds or fog or snow, bursts through it into blinding sunlight and a roaring, howling wall of sound. The train is a wall of smoke and fire and she squeezes the release on her harness, tumbles down into the sparks and the noise like she’s cannonballing into hell.

She lands hard, like always, but this time she rolls all the way off the top of the car, catching it with her left hand and slamming against it, knocking the wind out of her. She heaves her other hand up, grunting with the effort, and shimmies around to the end of the car where she drops to her feet on the rocking, heaving platform between the cars. She presses the muzzle of her gun against the lock, angled downward, and fires once. The door is sucked open by the wind, catching her neatly in the face. "Fuck!"

She hears a chuckle from above her. “Beautiful. Really top-notch.” Buffy is peering down over the edge of the car behind hers. As Stevie watches, she swings her legs around and leaps down lightly, seeming not to notice the unsteadiness of the join between cars. “You ready?” she asks, drawing her rifle.

“As I’ll ever be,” Stevie says, and they enter the train.

They press against opposite sides of the car, feeling their way forward through crates and darkness. Stevie hears several faint thumps from the rear of the train, which she hopes are the other Commandos. They’re almost through the first car when she hears the whirr of machinery. “Buffy!” she hisses, slowing. “I think-”

A turret rises from the floor between them, a red light blinking to life and then suddenly a fan of light, whirling across the room, and then there is nothing but the sound of gunfire. “Down!” she yells as she throws herself onto the floor. “Obviously!” she hears Buffy shriek over the din. _Jerk_. She crab-crawls toward the sound of the gun, the rattling of empty shells as they bounce onto the floor. As her eyes adjust and the smoke rises she can see that the belt feeding into the gun is almost empty. “Someone will be coming!” she yells. “We have to go!” Then a hand comes down and hauls her upright and Buffy’s soot-streaked face is in front of hers. “Again,” she says, eyebrow arched, “obviously.”

They run, careening forward through the train, and they make it another two cars before they see the blue light crackling in the air. “Shit,” Stevie says.

“We’re getting close,” Buffy pants. “They’re protecting him.” Stevie bites down on the urge to say _obviously_ as the door to the next car bursts open. Turrets line the room, and at the far end in front of the door stands an armored sentinel, eyes glowing blue. “Shit,” Stevie says again.

There is a pause which can only last a second but which feels like it lasts forever as they dive for the ground, and then the world explodes into sizzling light. She hears shouting from above her and flings the shield toward the last place she saw the glowing blue eyes, hears a satisfying clang. The gunfire doesn't stop, though, and she hears someone cry out in pain. She bolts to her feet, looking for the shield, and she sees Buffy in the far corner of the car standing behind it. She has a pistol in her right hand, the shield in her left, and the sentinel is advancing on her as she fires at its eyes. "Buffy!" she yells. Buffy's eyes shift to her and the sentinel pistons its arm forward, directly into the center of the shield. Buffy is flung backward like a rag doll, the sentinel's fist continuing through the wall of the car into the open air. 

Almost instantly the rocking of the train gets more pronounced as the wind whips into the car, picking up whatever it can and sucking it out into the air. Buffy lies crumpled on the floor, her fingers curled loosely around the edge of the shield. Her hair whips around her face, raveling toward the gaping hole. The car shudders and Stevie stumbles. She sees Dernier laying into one of the turrets with the butt of his gun, sparks flying around him.

The sentinel advances on Buffy and Stevie has no shield.

She launches herself forward, seizing the robot around the neck. It throws its hands up, trying to dislodge her, and wheels away from Buffy. She rains blows onto the machine, trying to wrench its head from its shoulders, trying to understand what powers it. The sentinel staggers across the car, slamming itself into the wall in an attempt to throw her loose. Her head smashes against the wall and her vision blurs for a moment, goes white, and when it fades back in she sees Buffy getting to her feet, arm outstretched toward the shield. The robot flings itself against the wall again, flings  _her_ against the wall again, and the car rocks violently. 

The shriek of metal rings out as the car  _lurches_ , a sickening, swooping motion as a wheel loses contact with the track for a brief moment. Stevie loses her grip on the robot and tumbles dizzily onto the floor, which feels... tilted. Her tongue feels thick in her mouth, heavy, and her head is... wrong. Her vision seems to expand and contract as she pushes herself toward the brightness in the corner of the car, the brightness which she understands to be daylight. The robot is above her, reaching down toward her, and she watches her hand bat at it from what feels like miles away. Then the robot's arm swings away from her, swings into a small dark form which hurtles away from it, and through the fog she understands. 

_Buffy_.

Her vision focuses and she lunges to her feet, yelling for Dernier, for Dugan, for anyone, even as she bolts toward the hole in the car. The shield is jammed deep into the robot's neck where it meets its shoulder, and it whirrs angrily as it tries to follow her. She can hear, faintly, the ring of metal on metal as one of the Commandos engages the sentinel, but her attention is focused forward, outward, on the small hand clutching the spur of broken metal that juts out out of the car, out above the chasm.

She flings herself onto the floor of the car, tears streaming from her eyes. "Buffy!" she screams, her hand outstretched. "Buffy!" She works her way out of the hole, the wind buffeting her immediately, getting in between her and the car, trying to lift her away from the train, and she crushes herself against the metal and wedges her arm under one of the metal rails, stretching her other hand out toward Buffy. Buffy clings to the shredded metal, trying desperately to bring her other hand up, to gain some sort of traction, and Stevie can see the blood streaked on the bar beneath her fingers.

"Stevie!" The wind whips the scream away, but Stevie watches her lips form the name and hears it as clearly as if they were standing side by side. She wills herself to stretch farther, imagines that she feels her fingertips brush against Buffy's skin, the fabric of her sleeve, but then Buffy makes an impossibly small yelping sound, a quiet disbelieving sound, a cry that reaches Stevie's ears and by the time it does Buffy's hand is slipping from the metal and Stevie lunges, she lets go of the bar and  _lunges_ , but it's too far and it's too late and Buffy is falling, has fallen, is gone.

She feels hands on her, pulling her, pulling her back inside the train, and she falls numbly to the floor. She is still clutching the railing, still reaching, still murmuring  _Buffy, Buffy,_ when the darkness closes over her and then she, too, is gone. 

* * *

(The fall takes such a long time.

Stevie disappears from view almost immediately, the train and gravity pulling them apart, and then there is just the white blank of the sky earth snow mountain rushing past her. The wind whistles in her ears.

The first impact - she doesn’t know it is the first, at least then - slams a bolt of pain through her left leg, and suddenly she is pinwheeling, still falling, now turning head over heels. She could almost laugh. She is sure her leg is broken, smashed by an outcrop of rock she couldn’t even see for the snow.

The second impact is worse.

She is tumbling through the air, unable to tell what is ground and what is sky, everything white and cold and her breath whipping away from her, when something seizes her left arm and _pulls_.

Everything happens quickly then.

Her forearm shatters, smashed so hard onto the goddamn rock that she’s impaled on it, hung up like a side of meat, only the rest of her doesn’t realize it and her weight keeps hurtling downward. There is a horrible stretching, tearing sensation, and she feels her shoulder slip from its socket as her body tries to keep falling. She feels her elbow separate, looks up to see the joint pull apart with a sick wet _thunk_ that she hears inside her head. Blood gushes down her arm, dripping into her eyes even as it freezes, slicking her left side. She realizes what is coming, shuts her eyes, opens them again, and watches as the fraying skin of her forearm unravels further, toward her twisted elbow. She is running out of pain, running out of space in her brain for the white-hot screaming of her entire left arm, and suddenly there is a flare of agony so blinding that she goes away altogether, away from her body, from her brain, from the cold. The last thing she sees is her tattered, empty sleeve, soaked in frozen blood, and then finally, blessedly, there is only darkness.

Her body hits the ground nineteen seconds after she slips from the train.

The last thing she thinks is _Stevie._ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Both for this... whole... thing, and for my protracted absence. I am not a very consistent updater and I am sorry!!! But if you will stick around I promise I will be here, I will see this thing through. We're very close to getting into the Winter Soldier half of this fic, which is my true love and calling, so if that's something you're into (she begs, needily), stay tuned. Comments and feedback are welcome as always! And sorry again!!


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the aftermath, and the beginning of the end.

Stevie doesn't remember waking up. She doesn't remember tearing through the train, killing every single enemy soldier she could lay hands on. She doesn't remember finding Arnim Zola, dug in like a tick behind a false wall. She doesn't remember Dugan and Monty hauling her off of him kicking and screaming, blood dripping from her knuckles and her teeth. She doesn't remember anything except that small sound, that surprised _oh_ , the empty howl of the wind. She doesn't remember anything except how badly she wishes it had been her.

She wakes up shackled to a cot in Stark's tent and there is a fine red haze across her vision, taste of copper in her mouth.

"Howard," she rasps.

He jerks back from his desk, narrowly avoiding tipping his chair, and scrambles upright.

"Are you here?" he asks, not moving toward her. "Are you - you?"

"I need water," she says.

"I need you to tell me you're cogent," he says, shuffling sideways toward a pitcher.

"What did I do?"

He laughs, but it's hollow, haunted like his eyes.

"You, uh, you've been trying to kill everyone," he says as gently as he can. "Every time you come out of it you come out fighting. Last time you just screamed; you, ah, burst all the blood vessels in your eyes."

He shakes his head.

"The fact that you're still lying down is a good sign, but you'll forgive me if I'm not rushing to your side."

He lifts his arm, blood already seeping through a bandage. "Tried that the first three times."

"Howard, I'm so sorry," she whispers, closing her eyes. They fly open at her next thought.

"Zola," she says urgently. "Did we-"

"Phillips has him right now. He's been in there awhile, so I'd wager he's talking."

The cuff on her left wrist opens. He walks around her head, unlocks the other, then frees her ankles.

"Sorry, doll," he says gently. "How ya feelin'?"

She looks down at the water glass he's just handed her.

"Bad," she whispers, and tears flood her eyes. He sits down and puts his arm around her. Neither of them says anything.

After a few minutes Stark squeezes her shoulder and says, "I'm gonna go see how Phillips is doing, okay? You sit tight. I think there's steak. I'll bring you some."

She waits until his footsteps have receded before rifling through the tent. She's almost halfway through Howard's bottle of whiskey when Peggy ducks under the flap.

"Rogers-" she starts, but stops when Stevie raises the bottle.

"I can't get drunk," she says. "Did you know that? Did he tell you?"

"Well, you also can't be poisoned," she says reasonably, placatingly. Her eyes are worried and skittish.

"I kind of suspected, but I also thought, _no. There's no way they'd do all this to someone and then_ also _make them immune to alcohol._ ”

Peggy presses her lips together and folds her arms.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says.

Stevie’s head snaps up and she glares at Peggy, hating herself for doing it but unable to stop. She can’t keep the venom out of her voice when she answers.

“You’re smart enough to know that’s not true.”

She sighs. “Rogers, what do you want me to say? You trusted Barnes, didn’t you?”

Stevie drops her chin maybe a quarter of an inch.

“You respected her? As a person, as a soldier?”

“Of course.”

“Then respect her death. Don’t make it about you.”

Her tone softens as she meets Stevie’s eyes, but not much.

“She died in service of something greater, Rogers. Greater than you or me or even this war. She died trying to stop evil and save innocent lives, and you’d do the same.”

Stevie looks at the floor, eyes blurring with tears.

“Don’t diminish her. Don’t blame yourself. She would be furious with you if she knew-“

“I know,” she says, voice low. “I know. But I still feel it.”

Peggy sits down next to her and takes her hand, and neither of them says anything until Howard comes back. He ducks into the tent holding two plates and a bottle of wine and stops when he sees them.

“You had the same idea,” he says, nodding at the bottle of whiskey. “Wait, is that mine?”

Stevie smirks. “You should have told me it wouldn't do any good.”

“Fair,” he says, setting the plates down on his desk. “Pegs, you’ll have to split one with me.”

“One steak, or one wine?”

“Both.”

They look at each other for a moment and Stevie sees that they love each other, even though they don’t know it yet. She is surprised by how much joy this brings her, a small sweet flowering in the ruin of her heart.

“I’m tired,” she says abruptly, standing up. “Howard, give me that-“

She takes the plate from his hand and hoists the whiskey.

“I need to be in my own space. I'm okay. I promise I’m not gonna try and fight you again.”

Howard looks at her, his face crumpled with worry.

“Doll-“

“Howard,” she says gently. She steps toward him. “It’s okay.”

She hugs him, still holding all the dishes, and his cheek is wet when hers presses against it.

“Love ya, doll,” he whispers before he pulls away.

“Love you too, Howard,” she says, her throat hitching. “I’m sorry for- whatever I did,” she finishes, gesturing at his bandaged arm.

“I’ve done worse to you.” He smiles ruefully. “Get some rest.”

“Thank you, Peggy,” she says, turning back to her. “As always, I don’t deserve you.”

“But you do, Rogers. You do.”

She walks across camp with her little china plate, the whiskey sloshing at her side. Her body feels strange and loose, but she suspects that’s from fighting the restraints for however long she was out. She puts the bottle to her lips again just in case.

She sits on her cot in the dark and eats her steak, and after awhile she lays down and stares at the ceiling. She doesn’t move again until morning.

 

Phillips’ voice wakes her like a slap in the face.

“Wake up, Rogers, we’re out of time.”

Stevie makes a noise in her chest and tries to move.

“Zola talked,” he says in response to her raised eyebrows. “And it’s worse than we thought.”

_Zola._

She wants to kill him so badly. She wants to gut him, carve him apart, watch him bleed and scream and die.

She shakes her head.

“What did he say?”

He flaps a hand at her. “Can you - please -“

She looks down and realizes she’s wearing an undershirt and what she assumes are Howard’s pajama pants.

“I’ll be outside,” he mutters.

 

“What did he say?”

She lopes alongside him, shoving her hands into her gloves, the shield bouncing on her back.

“Schmidt has totally broken with Hitler,” he says. “He says he isn’t thinking big enough. He- Schmidt - he doesn’t want to just _win_ the war. He has that blue shit, and he’s ready to use it.”

“What does that mean? Where is- what is he going to do with it?”

Phillips holds open the tent flap for her and they walk into the officers’ quarters. The map on the wall is covered in tiny red pins.

Arnim Zola looks up at her from the desk he’s handcuffed to.

“So good to see you, Captain.”

Stevie shoves aside the rage building inside her and steps closer to the wall. The pins bristle at her, clustered so close together in places they are plunged into the same hole. The names scream up at her. London. Paris. Barcelona. New York.

“It’s a bomb?” she whispers. “He’s made a bomb?”

Zola laughs and laughs.

“It is a bomb like an airplane is a bird,” he says. “It is death. And his target is... everywhere.”

He smiles cruelly.

Stevie lunges over the desk, hitting him squarely in the chest, knocking his chair over, landing on top of him. She pulls back her fist to drive it into his face and then Peggy shouts.

“Rogers!” she yells. “Hold!”

“Why?” She hears herself from very far away. “Why?”

“We made a deal with him, Rogers!” Phillips is yelling. “He’s got immunity!”

“He doesn’t deserve it,” she hisses, looking down at him.

“He gave us Schmidt’s location!” Peggy cries, and then she’s at Stevie’s side. “I know you want to hurt him, Rogers, and he deserves it but we don’t have time, we have to go now-“

Stevie drops her hand, looks up at Peggy.

“What do you mean-“

“Schmidt’s got a plane, he’s got the weapon, if he makes it across the Atlantic-“

Peggy is yanking at her, pulling her up off the ground, away from Zola, and her soul howls at the thought of leaving him alive but Buffy didn’t die so that she could let Schmidt blow up the entire fucking world and so she gets up and starts running.

* * *

(She lies at the foot of the cliff for two days, she thinks. She is unconscious for a lot of it but the sun sets at least twice while she's awake. The first time she wakes up she tries to move and pain grips her like a vise from head to toe. What is left of her arm throbs and aches but the blood is coming slowly now, mostly frozen, and she thinks that is why she still lives.

She wakes to the crackle of ice behind her. Someone speaks in Russian, and another voice answers. She tries to follow what they're saying but her head is filled with snow and silence. Something jolts her shoulder and she screams, unable to help herself. The first voice says, "Она живет," and the second voice laughs. Suddenly there is a face inches from her own. 

"Hello, Sergeant," he says, smiling widely. She feels something that is almost hope and then she sees the insignia on his chest. She starts pedaling at the ground, trying to push herself away from him, reaching with her remaining hand for her weapon-

The thing that touched her shoulder comes down on her wrist, and it is a boot, and it snaps the bones like twigs.

When she opens her eyes again they are dragging her, the sad faint trail of her blood already being obscured by new-falling snow. She says, "I'll kill you motherfuckers, I'll kill you," and they laugh and she blacks out once more.

The smell wakes her up, the ozone crackle of it, and the room is different but it is also exactly the same and she knows, she knows in her heart where she is, and she feels a despair deeper and colder than the ocean, and she drowns in it.

"Sergeant Barnes."

She doesn't recognize the voice. She's too busy scanning the room, trying to assess - weapons, exits, any kind of plan. The man steps into her eyeline. 

"Do you remember me?"

She looks at him as she subtly shifts her body, flexing her muscles against the metal bindings that hold her to the table.

"No, you wouldn't. You really only ever saw Dr. Zola."

A shudder wracks her frame, rattling her teeth. The man laughs.

"I thought that would get your attention. I worked with him, you see. I've read your file."

He steps closer.

"He will be very pleased to see you," he purrs, touching her face. She snaps her teeth at him and misses by a fraction of an inch. He chuckles, then backhands her sharply.

"The doctor is.. indisposed at the moment," he says as he moves away from her, folding his hands neatly behind his back. She can feel blood trickling from her eyebrow. 

"That's a shame," she says at last. Her voice is thin and fractured, and the effort it takes to speak makes her gasp.

"Isn't it?" 

He laughs again, uncapping a syringe.

"Don't worry, дорогая. You will see him soon enough."

She thrashes as he comes toward her, ignoring the pain, but the restraints are too strong and then the needle stings her arm and the last thing she sees is him laughing.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is dedicated solely to all of the amazing people who have been commenting and motivating me to keep writing this! i really had no idea that people were into it enough to be, like, sad that it wasn't continuing, so it has been a really lovely discovery and i am so so grateful to you all!!! i know this one isn't very long but hopefully it is enough to let you know that i am back on track. again thank you for being here, thank you EXTRA for being here despite my eternal silence, thank you for caring enough to comment into the void. kay i am done now thank you one more time ok goooodbye xx


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